
TWO OF THE 



SONNETS 



OF 



FI^ANCIS BACON, 



THE 



TRUE SHAKESPEARE 









-go 




After thr pint niit liii Van Somnier at Gorhamburji. 

FRANCIS BACON, 

THE TRUE SHAKESPEARE. 

" The most exquisitely constructed intellect that has ever been 
bestowed on any of the children of men. * * * From the day 
of his death his fame has been constantly and steadily progress- 
ing ; and we have no doubt that his name will be named with 
reverence to the latest ages, and to the remotest ends of the 
civilized world." - MACAULAY. 



TWO OF THE MOST REMARKABLE 
AND INTERESTING 



OF 



THE SONNETS 



OF 



FRANCIS BACON, 

THE TRUE SHAKESPEARE. 



A Compilation, Arrangement, and Composition 

BY 

HENRY HAMILTON HARWOOD, 

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA. 



..^- 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copie; Received 

DEC 23 1908 

Copyrifnt Entry 

OtASS /9 XXc, No. 

2-^3 &*-/ 2. 

COP> ii. 



w'-i^^^SpSa^STw?- 



Copyrighted, 1908, by 
Henry Hamilton Harwood. 



All Rights Reserved. 



Published December, 1908. 



'VVAREi <& duke:, 

PRlZfTBBa AVD POBl.TSHEKS« 

RICHMOND, VA. 



1lntrot)uctori?. 



A good many years ago I read Richard Grant White's 
challenge to Baconians to adduce evidence that Francis Bacon 
was the author of " Shakespeare's " Sonnets. Although I had, 
even then, learned to doubt that the Plays were the productions 
of their reputed author, William Shaksper, I confess that I 
had not yet become well enough acquainted mth the subject of 
the famous Shaksper-Bacon controversy to come to the con- 
clusion that Bacon was, indeed, the author of both the Plays 
and the Poems — Sonnets included — attributed to Shaksper. 

The controversy attracted me, however, powerfully, irre- 
sistibly ; and I soon found myself neglecting matters of 
business in order to familiarize myself with the hterature and 
the arguments of the controversy. 

In the course of time I grew confident that, while it would 
be tedious and laborious, it would be neither impossible nor 
very diffieidt, to show that it was Francis Bacon's pen that 
wrote the Sonnets as well as the Plays, and Venus and Adonis, 
and Lucrece. 

Besides being tedious and laborious, the undertaking has 
proved to be expensive beyond my expectation — having been 
carried on and out at the cost and loss to me of many thousands 
of dollars. 

After spending years in preparatory reading, I began, six 
years ago, the making of notes for editing " The Poems and 
Plays of Francis Bacon, the True Shakespeare." In October, 
1907, the first volume of the series — "The Sonnets" — was 
commenced. At the end of eight months of application my 
manuscript was ready for the press. But the unexpected hard 
times of this year — 1908 — have prevented the printing of it. 
Consequently, the manuscript has been pigeon-holed for several 



4 INTEODUCTORY. 

months, awaiting a change for the better in my fortunes. I, 
myself, though, am not, Uke my manuscript, a patient waiter. 
So I have selected two of the most important and interesting 
of the Sonnets, and have printed them by themselves, in the 
endeavor to arouse enough interest in my work to make possible 
the pubhshing of the whole book. 

The whole book will consist of an Introduction, of about 
3,000 words; The Argument (for Bacon), of about 45,000 
words ; The Sonnets, with parallels, notes, and comments, of 
about 190,000 words; and The Law in the Poems and Plays, a 
compilation from several writers, of about 30,000 words — about 
270,000 words altogether — about nine times the size of this 
book. 

My hope is that some of the readers of these two Sonnets 

will become sufficiently interested to purchase the larger book 

when it is pubhshed. As a slight inducement to them, I 

promise to deduct from the selling price of the larger, complete 

book (whatever the price may be), for every buyer of this 

hook mid that one, one dollar. Hence the importance 

of each buyer's acquainting me with his or her name and 

address. 

Henry H. Harwood. 

Richmond, Va., November J, 1908. 



XXVI. 

I^^ORD of my love, to whom in vassalage 
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit, 
To thee I send this written ambassage. 
To witness duty, not to shew my wit : 

Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine 5 

May make seem bare, in wanting words to shew it, 
But that I hope some good conceit of thine 
In thy soul's thought, all naked, will bestow it ; 
Till whatsoever star that guides my moving. 
Points on me graciously with fair aspect, 10 

And puts apparel on my tatter'd loving, 
To shew me worthy of thy sweet respect : 
Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee ; 
Till then not show my head where thou mayst prove me. 



Compare with lines 1-2 the first four lines of Sonnet cxvii 

Accuse me thus : that I have scanted all 
Wherein I should yoxvr great deserts repay ; 
Forgot upon your dearest love to call. 
Whereto all bonds do tie me night and day. 



With remarkable unanimity, students of " Shakespeare '^ 
agree in saying that this Sonnet recalls to their minds the 
Dedication of Lucrece. 

Lee makes the confident assertion : " This is a gorgeous 
rendering of the Dedication to Lucrece." 

Tyler ventures the remark : " There is a curious and 
interesting resemblance between this Sonnet and the Dedication 
to Lucrece. Drake's argument (Shakespeare and His Times, 



6 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

1817) that this resemblance gives evidence that it is Lord 
Southampton who is here addressed also, is certainly not conclu- 
sive.^^ 

Irving notes that " Lord Campbell speaks of the poem as 
' a love-letter, in the language of a vassal doing homage to his 
liege-lord ' (Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements, p. 101)." 



We have just now seen, under Sonnet xxv, that Essex 
had virtually made a vassal of Bacon by his splendid gift ; and 
that Bacon exclaimed, in accepting the almost princely present : 
^' My Lord, I see I must be your homager I " 

Essex had made himself the lord of Bacoti's love and 
had made Bacon his vassal. We shall soon read letters of 
Bacon to Essex and to Lord Burghley, written " in the language 
of a vassal doing homage to his liege-lord " — in language that 
will be substantial proof that their author and the author of 
the Dedication of Lucrece, and of the Dedication of Venus 
and Adonis, and of this Sonnet, were one and the same person. 

First, though, I mil take the step of clearing the field of 
a little brush- wood. 

The poet exultantly confesses that his duty is strongly 
knit to the merit of the lord of his love. The rhetorical figure 
constructed on the verb to knit is a favorite one with both 
Bacon and " the author of the Poems and Plays." 

In his Apology Concerning the Earl of Essex, Bacon 
writes : " And when, not long after I entered into this course 
[towards Essex], my brother, Mr. Anthony Bacon, came from 
beyond the seas, being a gentleman whose abihty the world 
taketh knowledge of for matters of state, especially foreign, 
I did likeivise knit his service to he at my lord's disj^osingT 

Observe the impHcation here : Bacon's — Francis Bacon's — 
service was already knit to be at Essex's disposing ; so he now 
likewise knits his brother Anthony's, &c. 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 7 

Some time previously, during the trial of Essex, Bacon 
had written to Lord Henry Howard, and had made use of the 
same metaphor : 

" My Lord : — There be very few besides yourself to whom 
I would perform this respect; for I contemn mendacia famce 
as it [fame] walks among inferiors : though I neglect it not, as 
it may have entrance into some ears. For your Lordship's love, 
rooted upon good opinion, I esteem it highly, because I have 
tasted the fruits of it ; and we have both tasted of the best 
waters, in my account, to knit inirids together^^ &c. 

And, at the trial, he used this language : " I hope that 
my Lord Essex himself, and all who now hear me, will consider 
that the particular bond of duty, ivhieh I do now, and ever will,, 
acknowledge that I oive unto his Lordship, must be sequestered 
and laid aside, in discharge of that higher duty which we all 
owe to the Queen," &c. 

To the Earl (later, the Duke) of Buckingham he declares : 
" I will rely upon your constancy and nature, and my own 
deserving, and the firm tie we have in respect of the King's 
service." 

To Mr. Michael Hicks he writes : " Such apprehension 
knitteth every man^s soul to his true and approved friend." 

To the Duke of Buckingham : " * * * -pj^g King 
himself hath knit the knot of trust and favor between the 
Prince and your Grace." 

In a speech in the House of Commons — Quinto Jacohi — 
he said : " And therefore, Mr. Speaker, I come now to the third 
general part of my division, concerning the benefits which we 
shall purchase by this knitting of the knot surer and straiter 
between these two kingdoms," &c. 

And I take from Perkins's speech in the History of King^ 
Henry VH. : 



8 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

" But it seemeth that God above, for the good of this 
whole island, and the knitting of these two kiyigdoms of 
England and Scotland in a strait concord and amity," &c. 

On the 31st of May, 1612, he wrote to the new sovereign, 
King James : " * * * But the great matter, and most instant for 
the present, is the consideration of a Parliament — for two effects : 
the one for the supply of yoiu' estate, the other for the better 
knitting of the hearts of your subjects unto your Majesty, 
according to your infinite merits 

But it would take up too much space to adduce all the 
instances of this figure that could be adduced from Bacon. 

In the Plays the metaphor is of frequent occurrence. 
Especially noteworthy is one in Othello, i, 3 : "I confess me 
knit to thy deservirig with cables^ of perdurable toughness." 

And another in Pericles, ii, 4 : 

Then you love us, we you, and we'll clasp hands ; 
When peers thus knit, a kingdom ever stands. 

And yet another in Macbeth, iii, 1 : 

Banquo : Let your Highness 

Command upon me ; to the which my duties 
Are with a most mdissoluble tie 
Forever knit. 

(It is possible that Bacon unthankingly, unacknowledg- 
ingly, adopted this word — to knit — as he did with many other 
words and expressions and ideas and sentiments — from Sidney's 
writings. In his Arcadia Sidney describes Pamela as 
u * * * of high thoughts, who avoids not pride with not 

1 On October 12, 1623, Bacon wrote to Buckingham: " "= * * 
myself have ridden at anchor all your Grace's absence, and my cahles 
are now quite worn." And on the 22d of the same month, to the same 
person: <«* * * jny cables are ^com out; my hope of tackling is by 
your Lordship's means." 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 9 

knowing her excellencies, but by making that one of her 
excellencies to be void of pride ; her mother's wisdom, great- 
ness, nobility, but (if I can guess aright) kyiit with a more 
constant temper." The word is met with also in Sidney's 
Sonnets.) 

Now, to spare the reader the trouble of searching fore- 
going pages, I will reprint a letter of Bacon's to Essex, that is 
already included amongst letters under Sonnet xxv : 

"To My Lord of Essex: 

Most Honorable and My Singular Good Lord : — 

I cannot but importune your Lordship with thanks for 
remembering my name to my Lord Keeper, which, being done 
in such an article of time, could not but be exceedingly enriched 
both in demonstration and effect : which I did well discern by 
the manner of expressing thereof by his Lordship to me. 
This accumulating of your Lordship's favors upon me hitherto 
worketh only this effect — that it raiseih my mind to aspire to he 
found worthy of them [1. 10 of this Sonnet], and likewise to 
merit and serve you for them. But whether I shall be able to 
pay my vows or no, I must leave that to God, who hath them 
in deposito. Whom, also, I most instantly beseech to give you 
fruit of your actions beyond that your heart can propound. 
Nam Deus major est corde. Even to the environing of his 
benedictions, I recommend your Lordship." 

And another, undated, from Gray's Inn : 

" * * * I shall ever, in a firm duty.^ submit my occasions, 
though great, to your Lordship's respects, though small ; and 
this is my resolution, that, when your Lordship doth for me, 
you shall increase my obligation ; when you refuse to do for 
me, you shall increase my merit. * * * " 

Agam : 

" * * * Lastly and chiefly, I know not whether I shall 



10 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

attain to see your Lordship before your noble journey; for 
ceremonies are things mfinitely inferior to my love and to my 
zeal ; this let me, with your allowance, say unto you by pen. It 
is true that, in my well-meaning advices, out of my love to your 
Lordship, and perhaps out of the state of mine o^vn mind, I 
have sometimes persuaded a course different: ac tihi fro tutis 
insignia facta placehunt : be it so, yet remember that the signing 
of your name is nothing unless it be to some good patent or 
charter, whereby your country may be endowed mth good and 
benefit: which I speak both to move you to preserve your 
person for further merit and service of her Majesty and your 
country^'' &c. 

Compare Sonnet cviii, 11. 3-4 : 

What's new to speak, what ncAV to register. 
That may express my love, or thy dear merit? 

There can be little, if any, doubt that Essex is alluded to 
in an undated letter (written, probably, in 1592, 1593, or 1594) 
to a person to whose identity we have no clue : 

" Sir : — In this solitude of friends, which is the base court 
of adversity, where nobody, almost, will be seen stirring, I have 
■often remembered the Spanish saying. Amor sin fin no tiene fin. 
This bids me make choice of your friend and mine for his noble 
succours ; not now towards the aspirmg, but only the respiring, 
of my fortunes. I, who am a man of books, have observed that 
he hath both the magnanimity of the old Romans ^ and the 
cordiality of the old Enghsh, and withal, I believe he hath the 
wit of both ; sure I am that, for mj^self, I have found him, in 
both ni}^ fortunes, to esteem me so much above my just value, 
and to love me so much above the possibility of deserving or 
obHging, on my part, as if he were a friend created and reserved 
for such a time as this." 

1 Hamlet, v, 2 — Horatio: I am more an antique Roman than a 
Dane. 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 11 

(This letter will be compared with Sonnet Lxxii.) 
Again I must repeat a passage already cited (under Sonnet 
XXV) from the Apology : 

" It is well known how I did many years since dedicate my 
travels and studies to the use, and, as I may term it, the service, 
of my Lord of Essex, which, I protest before God, I did, not 
making election of him as the likehest mean of mine own 
advancement, but out of the humor of a man that ever from the 
time I had any use of reason, whether it were reading upon good 
books, or upon the example of a good father, or by nature, I 
loved my country more than was answerable to my fortune ; and 
I held at that time [1592-3-' 4-5] my Lord to be the fittest 
instrument to do good to the state [the man of pre-emment 
merif], and therefore I applied myself to him [knit myself to 
him] in a manner which I think rarely happeneth among men : 
for I did not only labor carefully and industriously in that he 
set me about, whether it were matter of advice or otherwise ; 
but, neglecting the Queen^s service, mine own fortune, and in a 
sort my vocation, I did nothing but advise and ruminate with 
myself, to the best of my understanding, propositions and memo- 
rials of anything that might concern his Lordship's honor, 
fortune, or service." ^ 

1 Compare Hamlet to Horatio— Hamlet, iii, 2 : 

Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, 

And could of men distinguish her election, 

She hath seal'd thee for herself : for thou hast been 

As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing ; 

A man that fortune's buffets and rewards 

Hath ta'en with equal thanks : and bless'd are those 

Whose blood and judgment are so well co-mingled, 

Tliat they are not a pipe for fortune's finger 

To sound what stop she please. Give me that man 

That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him 

In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart. 

As I do thee. 



12 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

Truly, Bacon's duty was very strongly knit to Essex's merit. 

Montagu, in his " Life," says : 

" The exertions which had been made by Essex to obtain 
the Sohcitorship for his friend, and his generous desire to miti- 
gate his disappointment, had united them by the strongest bonds 
of affection^ 

It is mere fairness of treatment, though, to let Bacon qualify 
his declaration of vassalage to Essex. In his Apology he says.: 
" But it is very true that I, that never meant to enthral myself to 
my Lord of Essex, nor any other man, more than stood ivith the 
public good, did, though I could little prevail, divert him by all 
means possible from courses of the wars and popularity." 

And it is opportune here to quote from another letter of 
Bacon's, written in 1595 to Lord Treasurer Burghley, " concern- 
ing the Sohcitor's place," and showing Bacon's double-deahng 
and double-speaking, in consonance with the Machiavellian 
principle enunciated in the Plays — " Know thou this, that men 
are as the time is." " The times " were characterized by ras- 
cality, duplicity, untruthfulness, and every other imaginable 
" art of the court," on the part of aspirants to high office and 
royal favor ; and Bacon unquestionably " partook of the weak- 
ness of the times." The extract from the letter is as follows : 

" To THE Lord Treasurer : — 

* * * But I may justly doubt her Majesty's impres- 
sion upon this particular, as her conceit otherwise of my 
insufficiency and unworthiness, which, though I acknowledge to 
be great, yet it will be the less, because I purpose not to divide 
myself between her Majesty and the causes of other men, as others 
have done, but to attend her business only, hoping that a whole man 
meanly able may do as well as half a man better able.'''' 

This hterary habit of Bacon's — of professmg himself 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 13 

entirely devoted to the service and friendship of any one to 
whom he is writing — makes it difficult to decide whether certain 
of the Sonnets were intended for Essex or for Southampton or 
for Queen Elizabeth. 

Bacon seemed never to tire of assuring and reassuring 
Essex of his vassalage. Yet another of his letters to the Earl 
comes to my mind — a fine example of epistolary fawning with 
an eye to thiift : 

" To My Lokd of Essex : — 

My Lord : — Conceiving that your Lordship came now up 
in the person of a good servant to see your sovereign mistress ; 
which kind of compliments are many times instar magnorum 
meritorum ; and therefore that it would be hard for me to find 
you, I have committed to this poor paper the humble salutations 
of him that is more yours than any man's, and more yours than 
any man," &c. 

Besides, there is a long letter — part of which is of a tenor 
similar to the tenor of these letters to Essex — to Lord Burghley, 
written m 1592. One sentence bears on our subject: 

" Besides, I do not find in myself so much self-love but that 
the greater parts of my thoughts are to deserve well, if I were 
able, of my friends, and namely of your Lordship, who, being the 
Atlas of this commonwealth, the honor of my house, and the 
second founder of my poor estate, / am tied hy all duties [' Thy 
merit doth my duty strongly tie — knit'], both of a good patriot 
and of an unworthy kinsman, and of an obliged servant, to 
employ whatsoever I am to do your service," &c. 

And another long, undated solicitation to the same per- 
son, from which I will cull two or three sentences : 

" My Singular Good Lord : — 

* * * To your Lordship also, whose recommendation — I 



14 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

know right well — hath been material to advance her Majesty's 
opinion of me, I can be but a bounden servant [vassal]. So 
much may I safely promise, and purpose to be, seeing public and 
private bonds vary not, but that my service to her Majesty and 
your Lordship draw in hne. / wish, therefore, to show it with as 
good proof, as I can say it in good faith^'' &c. 

These letters and extracts sufficiently, I think, serve my 
present purpose of showing the almost doubtless probabihty 
that part, at least, of Sonnet xxvi was born and cradled in 
the same brain — and that brain Bacon's — from which issued a 
numerous and interesting progeny of letters to Essex, Queen 
Ehzabeth, Burghley, the Cecils, Buckingham, Howard, King 
James I., and other contemporaries of the philosopher-and-poet. 

A little farther on, though, I shall introduce, for a different 
purpose, other letters from the same source, singing the same 
strain of sincere, undivided, and unending affection and devotion. 

For a moment, I'll tarry to " gloss " line 11 — 
And puts apparel on my tatter' d loving. 

Only a Baconian, I think, can understand this line. 

If we go back in this Sonnet and re-read lines 5 and 6, 
we shall have caught our first scent of the author's meaning in 
line 11. Lines 5 and 6 are : 

Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine 
May make seem bare, in wanting words to shew it. 
That is to say — " if my wit were richer, my duty would not 
seem bare, unclothed, without apparel ; for then I should not 
want words to clothe or apparel my duty with." 

Words, then, as our poet regards them, may serve as 
clothing or apparel. 

And — not strange to relate — our philosopher. Bacon, had 
the same metaphorical conception of words. 

In his essay — Mr. Bacon in Praise of Knowledge — he 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 15 

preaches : " * * * All things may be endowed and adorned 
with speeches ; but knowledge itself is more beautiful than 
any apparel of words that can be put upon it." 

The 11th line, then, is — plainly enough to me — a 
" tattered " reminiscence of the thought embodied in the sentence 
from the essay on Knowledge, and is a pen-print of Bacon's. 

The metaphor of appareling with words and arguments is 
one of the flowers of rhetoric in the very " flowery " fourth 
scene of the second act of the first part of King Henry VI. 

In the altercation between Richard Plantagenet and the 
Earl of Somerset, a moment before those rivals pluck roses — 
one a red, the other a white rose — as party emblems, Planta- 
genet vaunts : 

The truth appears so naked ^ on my side 
That any purblind eye may find it out. 

To this boastful claim Somerset retorts : 

And on my side it is so well appareVd,^ 

So clear, so shining, and so evident. 

That it will glimmer through a blind man's eye. 

(In parenthesis, I will say that, in the writing of the 
hundred words immediately preceding these two claims. Bacon — 
undesigningly, maybe, yet plainly — left his thumb-mark. When 
called upon to decide between Plantagenet and Somerset in 
their contention, the Earl of Suffolk confesses : 

Faith, I have been a truant in the law, 
And never yet could frame my will to it ; 
And therefore frame the law unto my will. 

This aversion to the law — that is, to the study and practice, 
not to the existence and operation, of the law — is characteristic 

1 Notice the employment of nuked and ajipnteVd here and in the 
Sonnet. 



16 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

of Bacon, and will be treated in detail and exhaustively under 
Sonnet CXi. I make this parenthetical digression and anticipa- 
tion, because some Shakespeareans utterly reject this play of 
first Henry VI., refusing to recognize any part of it as the work 
of the author of the second and third parts. Finger and hand- 
prints show, though, that it had the same author that the others 
had — namely, Francis Bacon.) 

Mr. Sidney Lee says that this Sonnet is "a gorgeous 
rendering of the Dedication to Lucrece " — a dedication Mr. Lee, 
with beautiful, childlike faith and simplicity, beheves was 
indited by the heartless gentleman and illiterate scholar we have 
read about under Sonnet xxii — William Shaksper. 

Perhaps time given to an examination and analysis of this 
behef of Mr. Lee's and of an innumerable host of other 
authorities on matters Shakespearean will not be wholly thrown 
away and fruitless. 

Of course, this belief includes the Dedication of Venus 
and Adonis. 

In order to discuss them, we should have the Dedications 
conveniently under eye. So I shall copy them here — the 
Dedication of Venus and Adonis first. 

To The Right Honourable Henry Wriothesley, 

Earl of Southampton and Baron of Titch field : — 

Right Honourable : — I know not how I shall offend in 
dedicating my mipolished Hnes to your Lordship, nor how the 
world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support 
so weak a burthen : only if your Honour seem but pleased, I 
account myself higliLy praised, and vow to take advantage of 
all idle hours, till I have honoured you with some graver labour. 
But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall 
be sorry it had so noble a godfather ; and never after ear so 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 17 

barren a land, for fear it jdeld me still so bad a harvest. I leave 
it to your honourable survey, and your Honour to your heart's 
content ; which I wish may always answer your own wish, and 
the world's hopeful expectation. 

Your Honour's m all duty, 

William Shakespeare.^ 

Of Lucrece : 

To THE Right Honourable Henry Wriothesley, 

Earl of Southampton and Baron of Titchfield : — 

The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end; 
whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a supei-fluous 
moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not 
the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of accept- 
ance. What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours ; 
being part in all I have devoted yours. Were my worth 
greater, my duty would show greater : meantime, as it is, it is 
bound to your Lordship, to whom I wish long life, still 
lengthened with all happiness. 

Your Lordship's in all duty, 

William Shakespeare. 

Venus and Adonis was given to Southampton, and the 
world, in 1593 ; Lucrece, in 1594. Li those years the young 
Earl was still in full flower and good odor in Elizabeth's favor 
and graces. He was gay and hcentious, fond of bear-baitings 
and masks and plays. Besides, he possessed wealth, and was a 
generous patron of hterary merit. His high family connections, 
his influential acquaintances and associates, his aesthetic tastes, 

1 Mr. Isaac Hull Piatt, in Book News, September, 1904, says : 
"The name Shakespeare makes its first appearance in English 

annals appended to the dedication of 'Yenus and Adonis,' in 1593; 

with all the sixty-seven, more or less, ways in which the name of the 

Stratford family was spelled, that never occurs." 



18 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

and his abundant means, all combined, made his good will and 
patronage very much to be desired by the semi-tradesman — 
the theater-manager, Shaksper. That successful business man 
must have understood, better than most men of his vocation 
did, the arts of advertising himself and his business. And, 
seeing other men gaining favor and remuneration from the 
young man by means of their adulatory writings, and being 
unable to write anything whatever himself, what is more 
probable than the theory that he made terms with the talented 
but needy " noverint," Francis Bacon, for something from his 
pen, that — unlike the plays Bacon was then, and had been, 
writing — should be destined for and dedicated to the young 
man alone? 

Certain beyond the shadow of a doubt it is, I think, 
that Bacon wrote the Dedications ; and I feel no hesitancy in 
making the same assertion respecting both poems. In this 
book, however, I shall have to restrict myself to showing only 
that he wrote the Dedications. 

In the Dedication of Venus and Adonis, the author calls 
his poem " unpolished lines " ; in that of Lucrece he calls that 
poem " my untutored lines." These characterizations will be 
mentally paralleled by the student with part of Sonnet 
cxxxvni : 

When my love swears that she is made of truth, 
I do believe her, though I know she lies ; 

That she might think me some imtutor'd youth, 
Unlearned in the world's false subtleties. 

And a passage from Love's Labors Lost, iv, 2 : " * * * After 
his undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or, 
rather, unlettered, or, ratherest, unconfirmed, fashion." 

Now, I am well aware that not much capital can be made 
of these self-disparaging adjectivations considered by themselves, 



/' 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 19 

because the practice of belittling the value of one's own dedi- 
cated literary productions has been a common one throughout 
the ages. Still, in order to make all the use I can of my 
material, I will quote part of a sentence here — the rest of it a 
moment later — from a letter of Bacon's to Essex (" before his 
going to li-eland ") : " Thus I have presumed to write these few 
hues to your Lordship, in methodo ignorantion [m the manner of 
ignorance], which is, when a man speaketh of any subject, not 
according to the parts of the matter, but according to the model 
of his own knowledge," &c. 

Next, I will make comparison of several phrases in the 
Dedication with a sentence from one of Bacon's legal writings. 

The dedicator writes: u * * * gQ strong a prop to 
support so iveak a burthen," — " * * * if the first heir of my 
invention prove deformed," — " I shall * * * never after ear 
so barren a land " ; and Bacon, in The Statute of Uses : 
u * * * Where an inferior wit [' my own unableness, 
which I had continual sense and feehng of] is bent and con- 
stant upon one subject, he shall many times, with patience and 
meditation, dissolve and undo many of the knots^ which a greater 
wit, distracted with many matters, would rather cut in two than 
U7iknit ; and, at the least, if my invention or judgment be too 
barren or too iveak, yet, by the benefit of other arts, I did hope 
to dispose or digest the authorities which are in cases of Uses 
in such order and method as they should take hght one from 
another, though they took no light from me." 

Here we meet again with the figure of knitting, and, in one 
clause, with three important words — inventio7i, barren, weak — 
that occur in the very brief Dedication. 

Again, Advancement, Book ii : 

" In the handling and undertaking of which work I am not 
ignorant what it is that I do now move and attempt, nor in sen- 



20 TWEIS^TY-SIXTH SONNET. 

sible of mine own weakness to sustain my purpose; but my 
hope is that, if my extreme love to learning carry me too far, 
I may obtain the excuse of affection, for that ' it is not granted 
to man to love and be wise.' " 

The metaphor of a strong prop supporting a weak burden 
is a conceitful variation of figures that embellish both the Plays 
and Bacon's prose. 

Thus, Measure for Measure, iii, 2 : 

How may likeness, made in crimes, 
Making practice on the times, 
Draw ivith idle spiders' strings 
Most pond'rous and substantial things ! 

And King John, ia', 8 : 

The smallest thread 
That ever spider twisted from her womb 
Will serve to strangle thee ; a rush will he 
A beam to hang thee on. 

And 2d Henry IV., iv, 5 : 

My cloud of dignity 
Is held from falhng by so weak a wind 
That it will quickly drop. 

In Bacon we encounter, in The History of King Henry 
VII. : 

" * * * In this fourteenth year also, by God's won- 
derful providence, that boweth things unto his will and hangeth 
great weights upon small wires,"" &c. 

And in The Advancement of Learning, Bk. ii : 

" * * * But such being the workmanship of God, 
that he hangs the greatest weight upon the smallest ivire — maxima e 
minimis suspendens,'''' &c. 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 21 

The Dedication has : " But if the first heir of my invention 
prove deformed. " ; and Bacon, in a letter to the University of 
Cambridge, upon his sending to their pubhc library his Novum 
Organum, says : " Seeing I am your son and your disciple, it will 
much please me to repose in your bosom the issue which I have 
lately brought forth into the world, for otherwise I should look 
upon it as an exposed child " — thus displaying remark worthy 
similarity of thought to, even though not identity of expression 
with, the language of the Dedication. 

To the Earl of Salisbury Bacon writes: 

" I am not ignorant how mean a thing I stand for in 
desiring to come into the Solicitor's place. * * * 

" Although I know your fortune is not to want a hundred 
such as I am, yet I shall be ever ready to give you my best and 
Jirst fruits [the first heirs of my invention], and to supply, as 
much as in me lieth, a worthiness b}' thankfulness." 

I wonder what Mr. Lee, who pronounced this Sonnet " a 
gorgeous rendering of the Dedication to Lucrece," would have 
said if he had been acquainted mth a certain letter of Bacon's 
to Burghley, which I am about to bring forward for comparison 
with both Dedications. This is the letter : 

To THE Lord Treasuree Burghley : 

Most Honorable and My Very Good Lord : — 

I know I may commit an error in writing this letter ^ [" / 
hiow not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to 
your Lordship ''^~\, both in a time of great and weighty business; 
as also when myself am not induced thereto by any new par- 
ticular occasion: And, thereof, your Lordship may impute to 
me either levity or ignorance, what appertaineth to good respects 

1 Compare Sonnet cxix, 1. 5: What wretched errors hath my 
heart committed. 



22 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

and forwardness of dealing ; especially to an honorable person 
in whom there is such concurrence of magnitudo honoris et 
oneris [greatness of honor and of burthen], as it is hard to say, 
whether is the greater. 

But I answer myself first, that I have ever noted it as a 
part of your Lordship's excellent wisdom — parvis componere 
magnis — that yon do not exclude inferior matters of access 
amongst the care of great. And, for myself, I thought it would 
better manifest what I desire to express, if I did write out of a 
deep and settled consideration of my own duty^ ^ rather than upon 
the spur of a particular occasion. 

And, therefore (my singular good Lord), ex ahundantia 
cordis^ I must acknowledge hmv greatly and diversely your Lord- 
ship hath vouchsafed to tie ine unto you by many your benefits 
[your Lordship hath knit me unto you, «&ic.]. 

The reversion of the office which your Lordship only pro- 
cured unto me and carried through great and vehement oppo- 
sition, though it yet bear no fruit, yet it is one of the fairest 
flowers of my poor estate ; your Lordship's constant and serious 
endeavors to have me Solicitor ; your late honorable wishes, for 
the place of the Wards ; together with your Lordship's attempt 
to give me way by the remove of Mr. Sohcitor ; they be matters 
of singular obligation ; besides many other favors, as well by 
your Lordship's grants from yourself as by your commendation 
to others, which I have had for my help [surely, here is " merit " 
enough to k7iit the letter-writer's duty strongly to the personage 
addi'essed] ; and may justly persuade myself, out of the few 
denials I have received, that fewer might have been, if mine own 
industry and good hap had been answerable to your Lordship's 
goodness [if I had shewn me worthy of thy goodness — or sweet 
respect"]. 

1 Compare the repeated and stressful employment of this word — 
duty — in this letter with its equally important role in the Dedications^ 
and with lines 3 and 4 of this Sonnet. 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 23 

But, on the other side, I most humbly pray your Lordship's 
pardon if I speak it^ — the time is yet to come that your Lord- 
ship did ever use, or command, or employ, me in my profession 
in any services or occasion of your Lordship's own, or such as 
are near unto your Lordship ; which hath made me fear some- 
times that your Lordship doth more honorably affect me than 
thoroughly discern of my most humble and dutiful affection to 
your Lordship again. Which, if it were not in me, I know 
not whether I were unnatural, unthankful, or unwise. This 
causeth me, most humbly to pray your Lordship (and I know 
mine own case too well to speak it as weening I can do your 
Lordship service, but as willing to do it, as) to believe that 
your Lordship is upon just title a principal owner and proprietor 
of that I cannot call talent — hut mite — that Grod hath given me ; 
which I ever do, and shall, devote to your service [Lucrece : 
" What I have done is yours ; what I have to do is yours ; being 
part m all I have devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my 
duty would shew greater ; meantime, as it is, it is bound to 
your Lordship," &c.] ^ 

And in Hke humble manner I pray your Lordship to pardon 
mine errors, and not impute unto me the errors of an}'^ others 
(which, I know also, themselves have by this time left and fore- 
thought) ; but to conceive of me to be a man that daily profiteth 

1 Mr. 'LQQ—Life of WiUvnn sh<)k-s}u'art\ p. 130— says : "Eepeatedly 
does the sonnetteer renew the assurance j?iven there [in the Lu.crece 
epistle, or Dedication] tliat his patron is ' part of all' he has or is. 
Frequently do we meet in the Sonnets with such expressions as these : 

[I] by a part i,f all your glory live (xxxvii, 12) ; 

Thou art all the better part of me (xxxix, 2) ; 

My Spirit is thine, the better part of me (lxxiv. 8i ; 
while ' the love without end ' which Shakespeare has vowed to South- 
ampton in the light of day re-appears in Sonnets addressed to the 
youth as ' eternal love ' (^cviii, 9), and a devotion ' what shall have no 
end' (ex, 9)." 



24 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

in duty. It is true, I do in part comfort myself, supposing that 
it is my weahiess and insufficiency that moveth your Lordship, 
who hath so general a command to use others more able. ^ 

But let it be as it is; for duty only and homage, I will 
boldly undertake that nature and true thankfulness shall never 
give place to a politic dependence. 

Lastly, I most humbly desire your Lordship to continue 
unto me the good favor and countenance and encouragement in 
the course of my poor travails, whereof I have had some taste 
and experience ; for the which, I yield your Lordship my very 
humble good thanks. And so again craving youi* Honor's 
pardon for so long a letter, carrying so e^npty an offer of so 
unpuissant [of so weak^ a service, but yet a true and unfeigned 
signification of an honest and vowed duty, I cease — commending 
your Lordship to the preservation of the Divine Majesty. 

Amongst the Letters from Birch that Montagu reprints, 
there is one composed in Bacon's presentation style. The 
letter was written to King James, m 1623, to present to him 
a copy of the De Augmentis Scientiarum, the revised and 
enlarged edition of The Advancement of Learnmg, published 
in 1605. It runs : 

It May Please Your Most Excellent Majesty : — 

I send in all humbleness to your Majesty the poor fruits of 
my leisure. This book was the first thing that ever I presented 
to your Majesty ; and it may be will be the last. For I had 
thought it should have [been] posthuma proles [a posthumous 
offspring — "heir of my invention "] . But God hath otherwise 
disposed for a while. It is a translation, but almost enlarged to 
a new work. I had good helps for the language. I have been 

1 The continual undervaluing of himself in this letter, as in the 
Dedications, is noteworthy. 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 25 

also mine own mdex expurgatorius, that it may be read in all 
places. For, since my end of putting it into Latin was to have 
it read everywhere, it had been an absurd contradiction to free 
it in the language and to pen it up in the matter. Your 
Majesty will vouchsafe graciously to receive these poor sacrifices 
of him that shall ever desire to do 3^ou honor while he breathes, 
and fulfilleth the rest in pra^^ers. 

Your Majesty's true beadsman and most humble servant, &c. 
Todos duelos con pan son huenos : itaque dat vestra Maiestas 
oholum Belisario. 

In the Dedication we read: u * * * if your Honor 
seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to 
take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honored you with 
some graver labor.'* 

And in a letter to the King, January 2, 1618, Bacon tells 
and promises his royal master :"***!, therefore, whom only 
love and duty to your Majesty, and your royal hne, hath made a 
financier, do intend to present unto your Majesty a perfect book 
of your estate, like a perspective glass, to draw your estate 
nearer to your sight ; beseeching your Majesty to conceive that 
if I have not attained to do that I would do in this, ivhich is not 
proper for me, nor in my element, I shall make your Majesty 
amends in some other thing in ivhich I am better bred." 

The dedicator says [I have changed the order of the 
words] : " I wish your hearfs content may always answer your 
own wish." " Heart's content " and " heart's ease " are favorite 
expressions in both Bacon's acknowledged writings and the 
Plays (but are, of course, also found in many other works of 
Bacon's time and of preceding times). 

In Troilus and Cressida, i, 2, Cressida says : 

Then, though my hearfs content firm love doth bear, 
Nothing of that shall from mine eyes appear. 



26 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

In The Merchant of Venice, ni, 4, Jessica tells Portia : 
I wish joui Ladyship all hearths conte?it. 

In Juhus Caesar, i, 2, Caesar comments on Cassius: 
Such men as he be never at hearths ease 
Whiles they, behold a greater than themselves. 

And several other instances. 

The form " heart's ease " flowed freely from Bacon's quill. 

A letter to the Duke of Buckingham has preserved it, and, 
in addition, yet another example of the writer s fondness for the 
metaphorical use of the verb " to knit." 

"Excellent Lord: — 

* * * You are not as a Lerma or an Ohvares, and 
many others the hke, who have insinuated themselves into the 
favor of young princes, during the kings', their fathers', time, 
against the bent and inclination of the kings : but, contrarimse, 
the king himself hath knit the knot of trust and favor between the 
prince and your Gt-race^ wherein you are not so much to take 
comfort in that you may seem to have two lives in your own 
greatness, as in this, that hereby you are enabled to be a noble 
instrument for the service, contentment, and hearths ease, both 
of father and son," &c. 

To Sir Michael Hickes, Bacon wrote : 

" Your wits seem not travelled, but fresh, by your letter, 
which is to me an infallible argument of heart'' s ease,^'' &c. 

And, in 1624, to King James: 

u * * * Before I make my petition to your Majesty, 

I make my prayers to God above, pectore ah imo, that, if I 

have held anything so dear as your Majesty's service, (nay) 

your hearts ease, and your honor, I may be repulsed with a 

denial," &c. 

Fe. St. Albans. 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 27 

Finally, we have a good parallel between " I wish your 
heart's content may always answer your ow^i wish " and this 
clause from a letter to the Queen (written about the time of 
the writing of the Dedication of Lucrece) : u * * * j 
wish your Majesty served answerable ^ to yourself [answerable 
to your own wish] " ; and a tolerable one with this short prayer 
of Bacon's in behalf of Essex (in the letter to Essex printed in 
the first pages under this Sonnet) : "Whom [God], also, I most 
mstantly beseech to give you fruit of your actions beyond that 
your heart can propound." 

Of the Dedication of Lucrece the first clause of the 
first sentence stands — " The love I dedicate to your Lordship is 
without end." This phrasing is trite enough to be the effusion 
of even the veriest tyro in letter — and dedication — ^vriting. It 
happens, however, to be a form of a sentiment that actually 
was occasionally introduced by Bacon into his letters. Thus, 
in the letter written, probably, in the period of 1592-1594, to a 
correspondent whose name was omitted from the preserved 
draft or copy (already given in part under this Sonnet), he says : 

" Sir : — In this solitude of friends, which is the base court 
of adversity, where nobody, almost, will be seen stirring, I have 
often remembered this Spanish saying. Amor sin fin no tiene fin 
[Love without end is without end]." 

In a letter " framed as from Mr. Anthony Bacon to the 
Earl of Essex," Bacon managed to insert essentially the same 
thought : " For, though I [Essex] am so unfortunate as to be 
a stranger to her Majesty's eye, much more to her nature and 
manners, yet by that which is extant I do manifestly discern 

1 Answerable = corresponding. Compare Taming of the Shrew, 
II, 1, line 361 : 

Six score fat oxen standing in my stalls, 
And all things answerable to this portion. 



28 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

that she hath that character of the divme nature and goodness 
as quos amavit, amavit usque ad finem [those whom she has loved 
she has loved even to the end]." 

And in 1603, when the Earl of Southampton — the same 
personage to whom Lucrece had been dedicated — was hberated 
by King James from prison, to which he had been committed 
by Ehzabeth for his complicity in Essex's treason, he wrote : 

" It May Please Your Lordship : — 

I would have been very glad to have presented my humble 
service to your Lordship by my attendance, if I could have 
foreseen that it should not have been unpleasing unto you. 
And, therefore, because I would commit no error, I choose to 
write ; assuring your Lordship, how [in-] credible soever it may 
seem to you at first, yet it is as true a thing as God knoweth, 
that this great change hath wrought in me no other change 
towards your l.,ordship than this — that I may safely be now 
that which I was truly before. And so, craving no other 
pardon than for troubling you with my letter, / do not now 
begin to he, but continue to be, 

Your Lordship's humble and much devoted." 

To Sir Robert Cecil he began a letter in this style : 

" It May Please Your Honorable Lordship : — 

I know you will pardon this my observance in writing to 
you empty of matter, but out of the fulness of my love," &c. 

It may be remarked that, while Bacon was entirely sure as 
to the constancy of his own devotion and love, he entertained 
little confidence in those virtues as they existed in his royal 
mistress. He tells Essex, in a letter of 1594 : " Princes, 
especially her Majesty, love to make an end where they begin." 

The Dedication continues: "The warrant I have of your 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 29^ 

honorable disposition, not the worth of my untutored Unas, 
makes it assured of acceptance." 

Similarity of wording is easily perceived between this 
sentence and one from a letter of advice of Bacon's to Essex : 
" Thus I have presumed to write these few lines to your Lord- 
ship, in methodo Ignorantice, which is, when a man speaketh of 
any subject not according to the parts of the matter, but accord- 
ing to the model of his own knowledge; and most humbly 
desire your Lordship that the iveakness thereof may he supplied 
in your Lordship hy a henign acceptation, as it is in me hy my 
best zvishiny." 

To the Earl of Salisbury he wrote : " Although I know 
your fortune is not to want a hundred such as I am, yet I shall 
be ever ready to give 30U my best and first fruits, and to supply, 
as much as in me heth, a worthiness by thankfulness.^'' 

Compare, too, the style of this letter to the same nobleman 
(" upon a New Year's tide") : 

" It May Please Your Good Lordship : — 

Having no gift to present you with, in any degree propor- 
tionable to my mind, 1 desire nevertheless to take advantage of 
a ceremony to express myself to your Lordship ; it bemg the 
first time I could make the like acknowledgment when I stood 
out of the person of a suitor ; wherefore I must humbly pray 
your Lordship to think of me, that now it hath pleased you, by 
many effectual and great benefits, to add the assurance and com- 
fort of your love and favor to that precedent disposition which 
was in me to admire your virtue and merit ; I do esteem what- 
soever I have or may have in this world but as trash in compar- 
ison of having the honor and happiness to be a near and well 
accepted kinsman to so rare and worthy a counsellor, governor, 
and patriot. For having been a studious, if not a curious, 
observer of antiquities of virtue, as of late pieces, I forbear to 



30 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

say to your Lordship wliat I find and conceive ; but to any other 
I would think to make myself believed. But not to be tedious 
in that which may have the shew of a compliment, I can but 
wish your Lordship many happy years ; many more than your 
father had ; even so many more as we may need j^ou more. 

So I remain." 

To the Queen, " upon the sending of a New Year's gift " : 
44 * * * I continue my presumption of making to your 
Majesty my poor oblation of a garment, as unworthy the wear- 
ing as his service that sends it ; but the approach to your excel- 
lent person may give worth to both ; which is all the happiness 
that I aspire unto." 

To the Earl of Northampton : 

" It May Please Your Good Lordship : — 

Having finished a work touching the Advancement of 
Learning, and dedicated the same to his sacred Majesty, whom 
I dare avouch (if the records of time err not) to be the learnedst 
king that hath reigned ; I was desirous, in a kind of congruity, 
to present it by the learnedst counsellor in this kingdom, to the 
end that so good an argument, lightening upon so bad an author, 
might receive some reparation by the hands into which, and by 
ivhich, it shoidd be delivered. And, therefore, I make it my 
humble suit to your Lordship to present this mean but well- 
meant writing to his Majesty, and with it my humble and zealous 
duty ; and also my like humble request of pardon, if I have too 
often taken his name in vain, not only in the dedication, but in 
the voucher of the authority of his speeches and writings. 

And so I remain," «fcc. 

And again to the Earl of Salisbury (" upon sending him one 
of his books of The Advancement of Learning ") : 

" It May Please Your Good Lordship : — 

I present your Lordship with a work of my vacant time, 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 31 

which if it had been more, the work had been better. It 
appertaineth to your Lordship (besides my particular respects) 
in some propriety, in regard you are a great governor in a 
province of learning, and (that which is more) you have added 
to your place affection towards learnmg, and to your affection 
judgment, of which the last I could be content Mere (for the 
time) less, that you might the less exquisitely censure that 
which I offer you. But sure I am, the argument is good, if 
it had lighted upon a good author ; but 1 shall content myself 
to awake better spirits, like a bell-ringer which is first up, to 
call others to church. So, with my humble desire of your 
Lordship's good acceptation, I remain — " 

And to the King, September 5, 1621 : u * * * j 
shall never measure my poor service by the merits which perhaps is 
small, but by the acceptation, tvhich hath been ahvays favorably 
great r 

The Dedication goes on with declarations of entire sur- 
render and devotion of the writer's self to the Earl : " What I 
have done is yours ; what I have to do is yours ; being part in 
all I have devoted yours." 

The reader will, without prompting, remember Bacon's 
letter to Burghley, reproduced a few pages above, and this 
sentence in that letter : " This causeth me most humbly to pray 
your Lordship * * * to beheve that your Lordship is upon 
just title a principal otvner and proprietor of that I cannot call 
talent — but ynite— that Grod hath given me ; which I ever do, and 
shall, devote to your service.''^ 

How thoroughly characteristic of Bacon such servile, mean- 
ingless phrases are will become more evident from other letters 
of his. 

He writes to Essex, for instance : 

" My Lord : — Conceiving that your Lordship came now up 



32 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

in the person of a good servant to see your sovereign mistress ; 
which kinds of comphments are many times instar magnorum 
meritorum ; and therefore that it would be hard for me to find 
you ; I have committed to this poor paper the humble salutations 
of him that is more yours than any man's, and more yours than 
any man." 

In 1615 he makes to James the avowal : " * * * Being 
no man's man but your Majesty's." 

And in 1620 he repeats it with courtier-like self-abasement : 

" * * * I have been ever your man, and counted myself 
but an usufructuary of myself, the property being yours. And 
now, making myself an oblation, to do with me as may best con- 
duce to the honor of your justice, the honor of your mercy, and 
the use of your service, resting as 

Clay in your Majesty's gracious hand, 

Fr. St. Alban, Can." 

The Dedication, again : " Were my worth greater, my duty 
would shew greater." 

And Bacon, to the Earl of Salisbury : " / am not ignorant 
how mean a thing I stand for, in desiring to come into the 
Solicitor's place." 

And, a good many years previously, to Lord Treasurer 
Burghley : 

My Sestgular Good Lord : — 

Your Lordship's comfortable relation of her Majesty's 
gracious opinion and meaning towards me, though at that time 
your leisure gave me not leave to show how I was affected there- 
with; yet upon every representation thereof it entereth and 
striketh more deeply into me, as both my nature and duty 
presseth me to return some speech of thankfulness. It must be 
an exceeding comfort and encouragement to me, setting forth 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 33 

and putting myself in way towards her Majesty's service, to 
encounter with an example so private and domestical, of her 
Majesty's gracious goodness and benignity ; being made good 
and verified in my father, so far forth, as it extendeth to his 
posterity. 

Accepting'them as commended by his service, during the 
nonage, as I may term it, of their own deserts, /, for my part, 
am very well content, that I take least part, either of his abilities 
of mind, or of his ivorldly advancement ; ^ both which he held 
and received, the one of the gift of God immediately, the other 
of her Majesty's gift; yet, in the loyal and earnest affection 
which he bare to her Majesty's service, I trust my portion shall 
not be with the least : nor in proportion with the youngest 
birth. For methinks his precedent should be a silent charge 
upon his blessing unto us all, in our degrees, to follow him afar 
off, and to dedicate ^ unto her Majesty's service both the use 
and spending of our lives. True it is, that I must needs 
acknowledge myself prepared and furnished thereunto with nothing 
hut a multitude of lacks and imperfections ; but, calling to mind 
how diversely, and in what particular providence, God hath 
declared himself to tender the state of her Majesty's affairs, I 
conceive and gather hope that those whom he hath in a manner 
pressed for her Majesty's service, by working and imprinting in 
them a single and zealous mind to bestow their duties therein, 

1 Hamlet, iii, 2: 

Hamlet : I lack advancement. 

Rosencrantz : How can that be, when you have the voice * of the 
Khig himself for your succession in Denmark ? 

Hamlet: Ay, sir, but while the grass groivs— the proverb is some 
what mvisty. 

2 See Sonnet i.xxiv, 1. 6 : The very part was consecrate to thee. 

( * Bacon, to the Earl of Salisbury : "I have been voiced to it [the 
Solicitorship] " ; and to the Earl of Essex : "I was voiced with great 
expectation [to the Attorney-Generalship].") 



34 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

he Avill see them accordingly appointed of sufficiency convenient 
for the rank and standing where they shall be employed : so as, 
under this her Majesty's blessing, I trust to receive a larger 
allowance of God's graces. And as I may hope for this, so I 
can assure and promise for my endeavor, that it shall not be my 
fault ; but what diligence can entitle me unto, that I doubt not 
to recover. And now seeing it hath pleased her Majesty to take 
knowledge of this my mind, and to vouchsafe to appropriate me 
unto her service, preventing any desert of mine with her princely 
hberality ; first, I humbly do beseech your Lordship to present 
to her Majesty my more than humble thanks for the same : and 
withal, having regard to my own umvorthmess to receive such favor ^ 
and to the small possibility in me to satisfy and answer what her 
Majesty conceiveth, I am moved to become a most humble suitor 
to her Majesty, that this benefit also may be affixed unto the 
other ; which is, that, if there appear in me no such towardness of 
service as it may be her Majesty doth benignly value and assess me 
at by reason of my su7idry ivants^ and the disadvantage of my 
nature, being unapt to lay forth the simple store of those inferior 
gifts which God hath allotted unto me, most to vieiv ; yet, that it 
would please her excellent Majesty not to account my thankfulness 
the less, for that my disability is great to shew it ;'^ but to sustain 
me in her Majesty's gracious opinion, whereupon I only rest, 
and not upon any expectation of desert to proceed from myself 
towards the contentment thereof. But if it shall please God^to 

1 Twelfth Night, in, 3 : 

.Sebastian: * =* * My kind Antonio, 

I can no other answer make, but thanks. 
And thanks, and ever thanks : Often good turns 
Are shuffled oft' with such uncurrent pay : 
But were my worth, as is my conscience, firm, 
You should find better dealing. 

And Bacon: " * * * I shall be ever ready * * * to supply, as much 
as in me lieth, a worthiness by thankfulness." 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 35 

send forth an occasion whereby my faithful affection may be 
tried, I trust it shall save me labor for ever making more protes- 
tation of it hereafter. In the meantime, howsoever it be not 
made known to her Majesty, yet God knoweth it, through the 
daily solicitations wherewith I address myself unto him, in 
unfeigned prayer, for the multiplying of her Majesty's prosper- 
ities. To your Lordship, also, whose recommendation, I know 
right well, hath been material to advance her Majesty's good 
opinion of me, I can be hid a hounden servant. So much may I 
safely promise, and purpose to be, seeing public and private 
bonds vary not, but that my service to her Majesty and your 
Lordship draw in one. ' I Avish, therefore, to shew it with as 
good proof, as I can say it in good faith. 

Your Lordship's, &c. 

It would be superfluous and wearying to present more 
examples of Bacon's incessant practice of preaching to others 
on duty and of promising, himself, to be always mindful of, and 
always to perform, his own duty to the Queen, the King, and 
his friends and correspondents. 

I cannot forbear, though, to extract from the Plays a few 
more lines that point to our philosopher as their creator,, and 
help to strengthen my contention that one and the same mind 
(Bacon's) wrote the Dedications and the Sonnets (and the 
Plays). 

1 Yet Bacon had already written to Burghley (as I have shown 
above) : " But I may justly doubt her Majesty's impression upon this 
particular, as her conceit otherwise of my insufficiency and unworth- 
iness, which, though I acknowledge to be great, yet it will be the less, 
becaui<e I purpose not to divide myself between her Majesty and the causes of 
other men, as others have done, but to attend her business only," &c. 



36 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 



I will draw first from Two Gentlemen of Verona, n, 4 ; 



Enter Proteus. 

Silvia : Have done, have done ; here comes the gentle- 
man. 
Valentine : Welcome, dear Proteus ! Mistress, I beseech you, 
Confirm his welcome with some special favor. 
Silvia : His worth is warrant for his welcome hither, 

If this be he you oft have wish'd to hear from. 
Valentine : Mistress, it is : sweet lady, entertain him 
To be my fellow servant to your Ladyship. 
Silvia : Too low a mistress for so high a servant. 
Proteus : Not so, sweet lady ; but too mean a servant 
To have a look of such a worthy mistress. 
Valentine : Leave off discourse of disability : 

Sweet lady, entertain him for your servant. 
Proteus : My duty will I boast of, nothing else. 
Silvia : And duty never yet did want his meed ; 

Servant, you are welcome to a worthless mistress. 
Proteus : I'll die on him that says so, but yourself. 

Silvia : That you are welcome ? 
Proteus : No ; that you are worthless. 

Here we have the same descanting on " duty," " worth," 
and " mean(ness) " that we hear with almost tiresome iteration 
in Bacon's letters, and in the Dedications and in this Sonnet.. 
Sentiments and language are substantially the same in all. 

Then, from Love's Labor's Lost, v, 2 : 
Biron : We number nothing that we spend for you : 
Our duty is so rich, so infinite. 
That we ma}^ do it still without accompt. 

(Compare Bacon below — " infinitely bound.") 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 37 

From Hamlet, ii, 2 : 

Polonius : I hold my duty, as I hold my soul, 

Both to my God, and to my gracious king. 

From Richard IL, i, 1 : 
Norfolk : Myself I throw, dread sovereign, at thy foot. 

My life thou shalt command, but not my shame : 
Ihe one my duty owes ; but my fair name 
(Despite of death, that lives upon my grave) 
To dark dishonor'd use thou shalt not have. 
(Note that Bacon writes to the Earl of Buckingham i- 
" The duties of life are more than hfe.") 

Finally, from Henry v., iii, 6 : 

±luellen: The Duke of Exeter is as magnanimous as 
Agamennion ; and a man that I love and honor with my soul, 
and my heart, and my duty, and my life, and my livings, and 
my uttermost powers. 

(Here the fact is " as plain as plain can be " — to a 
Baconian — that Bacon is seizing an opportunity to proclaim 
from the stage his devoted attachment to Essex.) 

The Lucrece Dedication concludes : " * * * It [my dutyj 
is bound to your Lordship, to whom I wish long hfe, still 
lengthened with all happiness." 

And Bacon was, if his own words can be believed, hke- 
wise hound — to every one of his friends, patrons, and corre- 
spondents. 

To Lord Burghley he wrote : " To your Lordship * * * I 
can be but a hounden servant.''^ 

To Essex he was "Your Lordship's ever most humbly 
hounden^ 

To the Marquis of Buckingham he protested: 

" * * * I would not fail to let your Lordship understand 



38 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

that, as I find every day more and more occasions whereby you 
hind me [knit me] to you ; so, this morning, the King liimself 
did tell me some testimony that your Lordship gave of me to 
his Majesty even now when you went from him, of so great 
affection and commendation (for I must ascribe your commenda- 
tion to affection, being above my merif), as I must do contrary to 
that that painters do ; for they desire to make the picture to the 
hfe, and I must endeavor to make the life to the picture it hath 
pleased you to make so honorable a description of me." 

To the Prince of Wales : " When I call to mind how infi- 
nitely I a7n hound to your Highness." 

To King James : " I think myself infinitely bounden to your 
Majesty." 

But the possible list would be little less than endless. 

To brmg these comparisons to a close, I will place in 
sequence the dedicator's " I \vish your Lordship long life, still 
lengthened with all happiness," and the clause, "I wish your 
Lordship all happiness," from the letter to Burghley, printed a 
few pages above, imder the Dedication of Venus and Adonis. 
This last extract is, I know, a bare straw ; yet it helps a little to 
show that the wind of evidence blows towards Bacon as the 
author of the Dedications. The sum total of evidence is, to my 
mind, irresistible and convincmg. 

To all these letters and passages from letters and other 
writings, I will append a Dedication that Bacon actually wrote 
and signed. This Dedication is prefatory to " The Arguments 
in Law of Sir Francis Bacon, Knight, the King's Sohcitor-Gen- 
eral in Certain Great and Difficult Cases " ; and is addressed 
" To My Loving Friends and Fellows, the Readers, Ancients, 
Utter-Barristers, and Students of Gray's Inn " : 

" I do not hold the law of England m so mean an account, 
but that which other laws are held worthy of should be due 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 39 

likemse to our laws, as no less worthy for our state. Therefore, 
when I found that, not only in the ancient times, but now at 
this day, in France, Italy, and other nations, the speeches, and 
as the}^ term them, pleadings, which have been made in judicial 
cases where the eases were mighty and famous, have been set 
down by those that made them, and published ; so that not only 
Cicero, a Demosthenes, or an JEschines hath set forth his 
orations, as well in the judicial as in the deliberative, but a 
Marion and Pavier have done the hke by their pleadings ; I 
know no reason why the same should not be brouglit in use by 
the professors of our law, for their arguments in principal cases^ 
And this I think the more necessary, because the compendious 
form of reporting resolutions, with the substance of the reasons 
lately used by Sir Edward Coke, Lord Chief Justice of the 
King's Bench, doth not dehneate or trace out to the young 
practicers of law a method and form of argument for them to 
imitate. It is true, I could have tvished some abler person had 
begun ; but it is a kind of order sometimes to begin with the meanest. 
Nevertheless, thus much I may say with modesty, that these 
arguments which I have set forth, most of them are upon sub- 
jects not vulgar ; and therewithal in regard of the commixture 
which the course of my Hfe hath made of law with other studies, 
they may have the more variety, and perhaps the more depth, of 
reason ; for the reasons of municipal laws, severed from the- 
grounds of nature,^ manners and policy, are like wall-flowers, 
which, though they grow high upon the crests of states, yet they 

1 Compare Henry V., i, 2: 

Exeter : While that the armed hand doth light abroad, 
The advised head defends itself at home : 
For government, though high and low, and lower, 
Put into parts, doth keep in one ( oncent, 
Congruing in a full and natural close, 
Like music. 



40 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

have no deep root ; ^ besides, in all public services, / ever valued 
my ' reputation more than my pains : ^ and therefore, in weighty 
causes I always used extraordinary diligence; in all which 
respects I persuade myself the reading of them will not be 
unprofitable. This work I knew not to whom to dedicate rather 
than to the Society of Gray's Inn, the place whence my father 
was called to the highest place of justice, and where myself 
have lived and had my procedure so far as, by his Majesty's rare, 
if not singular, grace, to be of both his councils ; and therefore 
few men so bound to their societies by obhgation, both ancestral 
and personal, as I am to yours, which I would gladly acknow- 
ledge, not only in having your name jomed with mine own in a 
book, but in any other good office and effect which the active 
part of my life and place may enable me unto toward the 

Canterbury : True ; therefore doth heaven divide 
The state of man in divers functions, 
yetting endeavor in continue 1 motion ; 
To which is fixed, as an aim or butt. 
Obedience ; for so work the honey bees, 
Creatures that, by a rule in nature, teach 
The act of order to a peopled kingdom. 

(With "concent," " congruing," "rule in nature," in this passage 
from Henry V., compare the following sentence from Bacon's "A 
Brief Discourse of the Happy Union of the Kingdoms of England 
and Scotland": "There is a great affinity and concent between the 
rules of nature and the true rules of policy : the one being nothing else 
but an order in the government of the world, and the other an order 
in the government of a state. * * * So that I still conclude there 
is * * * a congruity between the principles of nature and policy.") 

1 Compare the wording of this and the preceding clause with the 
wording of a line in 1st Henry VI., ii, 4, 1. 85 : 

Spring crestless yeoman from so deep a root f 

3 Compare Kichard II., i, 1 : 

The purest treasure mortal times afford 
Is spotless reputation. 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 41 

society, or any of you in particular. And so I bid you right 
heartily farewell. 

Your assured loving Friend and Fellow, 

Francis Bacon. 

At first glance, on first inspection, this Dedication will 
reveal to the cursory reader (I write from experience) the 
merest ghmmer of resemblance — if, indeed, any resemblance 
whatever — to the Dedications under examination and compari- 
son. Analytical study shows, though, that the hand of Bacon 
has made its pecuhar characteristic print here as well as in the 
other Dedications. 

The style is, in the main, I admit, different from that of 
the others. Yet, that fact is just what might be expected. 
Many years had elapsed, at the time of the writing of this 
Dedication, since the writing of the Dedication of Venus and 
Adonis (in 1593) and of Lucrece (in 1594). The theme of 
this work is wholly dissimilar to the themes of those poems. 
The men addressed in this Dedication were — theoretically, at 
least — of an intellectually higher, graver class than the " class " 
(of profligates) in which the young Earl of Southampton 
belonged in the early nineties of the sixteenth century. And 
Bacon's mind had, for a long time, been in training in the school 
of dry, logical legal lore and of unpoetical business. 

Despite these facts, characteristics of Bacon's style and of 
the diction of the Dedications are discoverable. 

We hear in this production the same harping on worth, 
worthiness, unworthiness, meanness — not a word of which is 
sincerely meant — that greets our ears when the Dedications 
and Bacon's letters are read. In the Lucrece Dedication the 
author disparages himself by saying : " Were my worth 
greater," &c. In this Dedication Bacon says : " I could have 
wished some abler person had begun." In the former the 



42 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

author says : " My duty * * * is bound to your Lordship," &c. 
In the letter Bacon says : " Few men so bound to their 
societies * * * as I am to yours." 

There are not greater differences in language and style 
between this Dedication and the others than between Love's 
Labor's Lost and Hamlet ; and the student of Bacon recognizes 
Bacon in all three Dedications as confidently as the student of 
" Shakespeare " recognizes " Shakespeare " in those two plays. 

In conclusion, I will call attention to a literary blemish in 
the fourth line of this Sonnet, that might else escape the 
reader's notice. I am alluding to the feeble, wretched play on 
words that the poet has low-artfully constructed mto that line — 
the " quibble " of ending the line with a word — " wit " — 
identical in form and sound with the first syllable of the word 
" Avitness " in the same line : 

" To witness duty, not to shew ni}^ wit." 

To this practice — of " quibbling," or punning — Bacon was, 
Ben Jonson relates, strongly addicted. Both the Plays and 
Bacon's letters give evidence of the fondness of their author 
for this kind of word-play. Jonson says of Bacon (I have 
already quoted him) : " There happened in my time one noble 
speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking ; his language, 
where he could spare or pass by a jest, was nobly censorious." 

And Samuel Johnson wrote of the author of the Plays:, 

" The admirers of this great poet have most reason to com- 
plain when he approaches nearest to his highest excellence, and 
seems fully resolved to sink them in dejection and mollify them 
with tender emotions by the fall of greatness, the danger of 
innocence, or the crosses of love. What he does best he soon 
ceases to do. ^ He is not long soft and pathetic without some 

1 Tolstoi has recently (1906-'7) expressed the same judgment. See 
"Shakespeare and the Drama," in The Fortnightly Revieiv, January, 
1907. 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 43 

idle conceit or contemptible equivocatioyi. He no sooner begins to 
move than he counteracts himself ; and terror and pity, as they 
are rising in the mind, are checked and blasted by sudden 
frigidity. 

" A quibble is to Shakespeare what Imninous vapors are to 
the traveller ; he follows it at all adventures ; it is sure to lead 
him out of the wat/, and sure to engidf him in the mire. It has 
some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are 
irresistible. Whatever be the dignity or profundity of his dis- 
quisitions, whether he. be enlarging knowledge, or exalting 
affection ; whether he be amusing attention with mcidents, or 
enchanting it in suspense ; let but a quibble spring up before 
him, and he leaves his work unfinished. A quibble is the golden 
apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or 
stoop from his elevation. A quibble, poor and barren as it is, 
gave him such delight that he was content to purchase it by the 
sacrifice of reason, propriety, and truth. A quibble was to him 
the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content 
to lose it." 

Even now, though, after being reminded of what they had 
read before, few persons will, 1 think, be able to believe that the 
poet deliberately stooped from the elevation, and violated the 
propriety, dignity, and grandeur, of the opening lines, to trick 
" a poor and barren quibble " — that would be of no credit to a 
low comedian — into the fourth line ; and fewer, I fear, will be 
able, at this stage of explanation, to see or to hear the quibble 
or pun, as a quibble or pun, even after reading the line or hear- 
ing it read. 

So we must get better acquainted with " Mr. Shakespeare " 
and Mr. Bacon, in order to sharpen our perception and under- 
standing. 

First, it will be fair to let " Shakespeare " give his own 
opinion of the habit of quibbling. 



44 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

In The Merchant of Venice, ni, 5, Lorenzo discourses : 
How every fool can play upon the word ! I think, the 

best grace of wit will shortly turn into silence, and discourse 

grow commendable in none but parrots. * * * 

O dear discretion, how his words are suited ! 
The fool hath planted in his memory 
An army of good words : And I do know 
A many fools, that stand in better place, 
Garnish'd like him, that^ for a tricksy tvord, 
Defy the matter. 

Here we distinguish Bacon's voice with ease. In The 
Advancement, Book i, the author writes : 

" * * * The first distemper of learning is when men 
study words and not matter ; whereof, though I have repre- 
sented an example of late times, yet it hath been, and will be, 
secundum majus et minus in all time. And how is it possible 
but that this should operate to the discrediting of learning, even 
with vulgar capacities, when they see learned men's works like 
the first letter of a patent or of a limned book, which, though it 
hath large flourishes, yet it is but a letter ? It seems to me 
that Pygmalion's frenzy is a good emblem or portraiture of this 
vanity ; for words are but the images of matter, and unless they 
have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is 
all the same as to fall in love wdth a picture. * * * 

" The second (distemper of learning), which foUoweth, is 
m nature worse than the former : for, as substance of matter is 
better than beauty of words, so, contrariwise, vain matter is 
worse than vain words." ^ 

We can easily imagine that the practice of punning by 

1 Compare Romeo and Juliet, ii, 6 : 

Conceit, more rich in matter than in words, 
Brags of his substance, not of ornament. 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 45 

others disgusted Bacon, and that he even ridiculed the practice 
openly. But it became, in the course of time, mgrained in him, 
second nature with him — and " nature was above art in that 
respect" — above his ability to break himself of the habit, as 
was the case with Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

A year or two ago I cut out from T. P.'s London Weekly 
this short article on " Shakespeare's Puns " : 

" Matter-of-fact critics have been sorely puzzled at the way 
Shakespeare's characters have of punning in moments of stress 
and agony. Who can forget Lady Macbeth's horrible jest ? It 
is dead of night. Macbeth has murdered the Kmg, his guest, 
and comes down-stairs to his wife, who, with nerves strung 
tense, stands waiting his success. He has done the crime with 
the daggers of the Kmg's own grooms, sleeping near him. 
Dazed and half mad, he has brought the daggers down with 
him. They must be taken back ; but, broken and terror-stricken, 
he refuses to face agam the sight of his slaughtered King. So 
Lady Macbeth herself takes the daggers and ascends to the 
chamber of horror. As she climbs the stairs she hisses out her 
terrible pun : 

If he do bleed, 

I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal. 

For it must seem their guilt. 

[The writer might have added Henry V., n, chorus : Have, 
for the gilt of France (O guilt indeed !), &c.] 

" There comes into our mind, also, the dying of John of 
Gaunt, taking leave of his life in an agony of sorrow for the 
woes of his countr}^, and punning dismally on his own name 
throughout a dozen lines : 

Old Gaunt, indeed, and gaunt in being old : 

******** 

Gaunt am I for the grave, gaunt as a grave, 
Whose hollow womb inherits naught but bones. 



46 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

" No wonder that the King asks, ' Can sick men play so 
nicely with their names ? ' We think of Constance, and of her 
frantic despair as she hears of the peace between France and 
England, cemented by a marriage which means the ruin of her 
son, Arthur, and herself. With wild energy she turns on the 
King of France, who had promised to maintain her against the 
usurper John, and upbraids him for his perfidy. And in the 
midst of all her vehemence we are startled by a sudden pun : 

You came in arms to spill mine enemies' blood, 
But now in arms you strengthen it with youi'S. 

" These tragic puns may be attacked by some on the ground 
of incongruity, or defended by others with arguments drawn 
from the mysterious recesses of human nature. For most of us 
it is enough that they are Shakespeare's " [and for many of us 
the explanation is that they are Bacon's]. 

I will supplement this newspaper article with three or four 
additional " nerve-graters." 

The dramatist rang the changes on the verb to tender and 
the noun and adjective tender almost as inanely as he did on 
the words gild, gilt, and guilt. 

In Cymbeline, in, 4, Imogen asks : 

Why tender'st thou that paper to me, with 
A look uyitenderf 

In Hamlet, surely, we shall not be shocked by such clownish 
wit — we might reasonfully say. Yet, the truth is, we are so 
shocked. 

In Act I, scene 3, we find this remarkable conversation 
between Polonius and Ophelia : 

Ophelia : He hath, my lord, of late made many tenders 
Of his affection to me. 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 47 

Polonius : Affection ! pub ! you speak like a green girl, 
Unsifted in such perilous circumstance. 
Do you believe his te7iders, as you call them ? 
Ophelia : I do not know, my lord, what I should think. 

Polonius : Marry, I'll teach you : think yourself a baby, — 
That you have ta'en these tenders for true pay, 
Which are not sterling. Tender yourself ^ 

more dearly; 
Or — not to crack the wind of the poor phrase. 
Wronging it thus — you'll tender me a fool. 

And in Act in, scene 2, Hamlet sarcastically tells Guilden- 
stern : 

" Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, 
you cannot play upo7i me." 

The reader will, I am sure, remember a note under Sonnet 
xxn (to Donnelly's account of Shaksper's application to the 
College of Arms for a grant of coat-armor to his father, John 
Shaksper), mentioning the quibbling allusion to Shaksper, in 
Lucrece, to be found under this Sonnet. The note had relation 
to this statement of Donnelly's : " His [Shaksper's] profession 
as a ' vassal actor ' prevented any hope of having a grant of 
arms made directly to himself," &c. Now, in Lucrece, St. 87, 
11. 5-6, we read this instructive, preceptorial reminder and 
caution, uttered by Lucrece to Tarquin : 

O be remember'd, no outrageous thing 
From vassal actors can be wip'd away. 

Here, in the second line, the poet has seemingly — has in 
reality, as I interpret it — made a venomous innuendo, a literary 
stiletto thrust, at actors, or rather at one particular actor — 
WilUam Shaksper. It is — considered apart from the time and 

1 Regard yourself with tenderness or affection. 



48 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

circumstances — a clever play on words that has almost the sud- 
denness and the dazzling brilliancy of lightning, and certainly 
could not have flowed into the poem from the mind of William 
Shaksper, himself a member of the class of vassal actors. Sane 
men do not flay themselves — nor even pillory themselves — 
gratuitously, or for the sake of a jest, a pun, a quibble. Despite 
its brilliancy and force, though, it is itself an "outrageous 
thing," regarded as a quibble or an innuendo ; for it is indis- 
putable that the poet exceeds the bounds of both propriety and 
probability in causing a woman in such extreme agitation and 
anxiety and terror as Lucrece was suffering — or should have 
been suffering — to use a phrase that the scoundrelly intruder 
could construe as denoting that the speaker of it was not truly, 
seriously, desperately in earnest. It is simply inconceivable to 
common sense that the real Lucrece could have quibbled at that 
moment. Yet the poet — who was Bacon — made Mb Lucrece 
quibble. 

Compare the villainous quibbhng on " color " in the same 
poem, Stt. 68 and 69. 

In Romeo and Juliet, i, 3, the nurse says of Juhet : 

I'll lay fourteen of my teeth — 
And yet, to my teen [tears] be it spoken, I have but four — 
She is not fourteen. 
A pun that was dragged in by the hau' of its head and then 

foisted on a semi-imbecile woman who was as incapable of ori- 

gmating the pun as she was of reading Greek. 

Of Bacon, Montagu says : 

" His playfuhiess of spirit never forsook him. When, 
upon the charges being first made, his servants rose as he passed 
through the hall, ' Sit down, my friends,' he said, ' your rise has 
been my fall ' ; and when one of his friends said, ' You must 
look around you,' he replied, ' I look above me.' " 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 49 

And Montagu speaks truly. Not in his younger days only 
was Bacon unable to " spare or pass by a jest." 

In 1617, when he was Lord Chancellor, he wrote to the 
King: 

" * * * And so, expecting that that sun which, when it 
went from us, left us cold weather, and now it is returned 
towards us hath brought with it a blessed harvest, will, when it 
cometh to us, dispel and disperse all mists and mistaking s.^^ 

And in the same year he facetiously assured the Earl of 
Buckingham : " It is the lirie of my life, and not the lines of my 
letter,^ that must express my thankfulness." 

He quibbled as Lord Chancellor, and quibbled poorly. 

Nor did he have either the good taste or the good sense to 
purge his talk and letters of undignified word-juggling, even 
after his fall from his high office. In 1623 he wrote to the 
Duke of Buckingham : 

Excellent Lord : — I send your Grace, for a parabien, a 
book of mine, written first and dedicated to his Majesty in 
English, and now translated into Latin, and enriched. * * * I 
hope your Grace * * * mil not send your book to the Conde 
d'Ohvares, because he was a deacon, for I understand by one 
* * * that the Conde is not rational, and I hold this book to be 
very rational. Your Grace will pardon me to be merry, how- 
ever the world goeth with me. 

Fr. St. Alban. 

About the same time he wi*ote to King James the famous 
letter, begging for pardon — full of penitential groans and tears — 
that bears such very strong resemblance to parts of Wolsey's 
even more famous lamentation and admonition to his servant 
Cromwell ; and allegroed the concluding hnes in this manner : 

1 See Wynclham on " hnes," under Sonnet xvi. 



50 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

" * * * Help me, dear Sovereign Lord and Master, and 
pity me so far as I, that have borne a hag^ be not now, in my 
age, forced in effect to wear a wallet ; nor I, that desire to live to 
study, may not be driven to study to live. I most humbly crave 
pardon of a long letter, after a long silence." 



The mind that could — and did — quibble with the words 
mists and mistakings, when writing a letter of the importance to 
the writer that the letter to the King was freighted with (Bacon 
was laboring to convince the King that he had not spoken 
derogatorily of "my Lord of Buckingham," a high favorite of 
the King's), and with the words " bag " and " wallet," when 
making the most earnest, heartfelt, tearful, and prayerful 
petition of his whole life, when the bark of his fortunes was 
shipping green seas, would not only not have hesitated at mar- 
ring, to the ear of grave readers, a grandly sonorous and 
dignified poem to his dear friend Essex by a pitiful puerility. 
He would have seized his opportunity \\dth avidity and have 
been childishly proud of his feat. There is little doubt possible, 
I am sure, that Bacon intended a pun, a quibble, in this fourth 
line, and that both he and Essex enjoyed it. And, although we 
may be so charitably credulous as to believe that " this waitten 
embassy " as a whole — the entire Sonnet — was Avritten in order 
" to witness duty," intimate acquaintance with the Plays and 
with Bacon's letters justifies the additional, qualifying behef 
that this fourth line was purposel}" constructed " to shew my 
wit" ("wit" in his day meaning intellectual powers). 

Compare Bacon — Preface to The Maxims of the Law: 
" Now for the manner of setting down of them, I have in all 
points, to the best of my understanding and foresight, applied 
myself not to that which might seem most for the ostentation of 
mine own wit or knowledge, but to that which may yield most 
use and profit to the students and professors of our laws." 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 51 

Compare the almost silly playing with words in Macbeth, 
1,4: 

More is thy due than more than all can pay ; 

and — with "more" again — in Sonnet xxiii, 1.12; and with 
" all," in Sonnet xxxi, 1. 14. And the play on the syllable and 
the word " pen," in Sonnet lxxxiv, 1. 5 : 

Lean penuvj within that pen doth dwell. 

See Wyndham, Sonnet cxiii, 1. 3. 

See Sonnets lviii, 1. 4, and cxli, 1. 12, for the appellation 
" vassal " figuratively applied by the poet to himself. 



Bacon's propensity to levity has caused some of his com- 
mentators and critics to form an incorrect estimate, an unfavor- 
able opinion, of the quality and character of the sentiments of 
the Plays. 

Tolstoi — in the article mentioned in the foot-note above — 
says : 

" Sincerity is completely absent in all Shakespeare's works. 
In them all one sees intentional artifice — one sees that he is 
not in earnest, but that he is playing ivith words.^'' 



For a long time I could get no satisfactory explanation of 
this persistent levity, so offensive to intellectual readers or 
auditors — a characteristic that is mamly responsible for the 
charge of insincerity against the dramatist. But I found the 
true explanation, I think, at last, in Bacon's utilization of the 
suggestion in Horace's Epistle I. (Book ii). Hues 262-263: 

Discit enim citius, meminitque libentius illud, 

Quod quis deridet, quam quod probat et veneratur ; — 

" For men learn sooner, and retain better, what makes them 
laugh, than what they esteem and respect." 



52 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

His audiences, coming to the playhouse to laugh, unawares 
imbibed the precepts of msdom. 

Mr. Lee, in a foot-note on page 128 of his " Life of 
William Shakespeare," says: 

" There is little doubt that this sonnet was parodied by 
Sir John Davies in the ninth and last of his ' gulling ' sonnets, 
in which he ridicules the notion that a man of wit should put 
his wit in vassalage to any one. 

To love my lord I do knight's service owe, 

And therefore now he hath my wit in ward ; 

But while it [^'. e., the poet's wit] is in his tuition so, 

Methinks he doth intreat [i. e., treat] it passing hard. * * * 

But why should love after mmority 

(When I have passed the one and twentieth year) 

Preclude my wit of his sweet liberty. 

And make it still the yoke of wardship bear ? 

I fear he [i. e., my lord] hath another title [i. e., right to] got. 

And holds my wit now for an idiot." 



This is the Sir John Davies to \\hom Bacon wrote — in 
1603, when Sir John went north to meet and welcome the new 
King, James I. — the famous letter containing the request, "be 
good to concealed poets." 



Although these notes have already far exceeded the limit 
I intended for them, I am going to extend them with matter 
which, though not strictly pertinent to this sonnet, will never- 
theless, I hope and beheve, prove interesting to the reader, 
because it relates to the reputed " disgrace " of Bacon's life — his 
impeachment of bribery and his removal from the office of Lord 
Chancellor. 

And there are two salient points in the section above on 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 53 

" quibbles " by which this appendix can be brought, after all, 
into a sort of connection with preceding notes. 

Turnmg back to the quibbles, we re-read Bacon to his 
servants (note the word) : " Sit down, my friends ; your rise has 
been my fall *' ; and to the Kmg : " Help me, dear Sovereign 
Lord, and 'pity meT 

Before proceeding, however, ^vith my story of Bacon, I 
will invite attention to language used by Cleopatra to Caesar — 
Antony and Cleopati'a, v, 2 : 

Be it known that we, the greatest, are misthought 
For things that others do ; and when we fall 
We answer others' merits in our name: 
Are therefore to be pitied. 

How natural it wouM have been for Bacon to ^vrite thus 
after 1621 ! 

Montagu says: 

" On the 15th of March, 1620, Sir Robert Phillips reported 
from the committee appointed to inquire into the abuses of 
courts of justice, of which he was chairman, that two petitions 
had been presented for corruption against the Lord Chancellor 
by two suitors in the Court of Chancery — the one named 
Aubrey, the other Egerton 

" Aubrey's petition stated, ' That having a suit pending 
before the Lord Chancellor, he had been advised by his counsel 
to present .£100 to the Chancellor, that his cause might, by 
more than ordinary means, be expedited, and that in consequence 
of this advice he had delivered the £100 to Sir George Hastings 
and Mr. Jenkins, of Gray's Inn, by whom it was presented to 
his Lordship ; but, notwithstanding this offering, the Chancellor 
had decided against him.' 

" Egerton's complaint was, that, ' To procure my Lord's 
favor, he had been persuaded by Sir George Hastings and Sir 



54 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

Richard Yovmg to make some present to the Chancellor, and 
that he accordmgly delivered to Sir George and to Sir Richard 
£400, which was delivered by them to the Chancellor as a gra- 
tuity, for that my Lord, when Attorney-General, had befriended 
him ; and that, before this advice, Egerton had himself, either 
before or after the Chancellor was intrusted with the great seal, 
presented to his Lordship a piece of plate worth fifty guineas ; 
but that, notwithstanding these presents, the Lord Chancellor, 
assisted by Lord Chief Justice Hobart, had decided against him.' 

" If Bacon, instead of treating the charge with contempt, 
and mdulging in imaginations of the friendship of Buckingham 
and the King, [they] thinking, as they were, of their own safety, 
had trusted to his own powerful mind, and met the accusation 
instantly and with vigor, he might at once, strong as the tide 
was against all authority, have stemmed the torrent, and satisfied 
the intelligent that the fault was not in the Chancellor, but [in] 
the chancery. * * * 

" On the 17th of March the Chancellor presided, for the 
last time, in the House of Lords. The charges, which he had at 
first treated \vith indifference, were daily increasing, and could 
no longer be disregarded. * * * He resolved, therefore, to meet 
his accusers ; but his health, always delicate, gave way, and 
instead of being able to attend m person he was obliged by 
writing to address the House of Peers. * * * 

"Although the King and Buckingham hoped that this 
general submission would be satisfactory, the agitation was too 
great to be thus easily quieted. * * * Their Lordships resolved 
that the Lord Chancellor should be charged particularly with 
the briberies and corruptions complained of against him, and 
that his Lordship should make a particular answer thereunto. 
* * * He [Bacon] proceeded, therefore, to a minute answer to 
each particular charge, which he so framed that future ages 
might see the times when the presents were made, and the per- 
sons to whom they were made. 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 55 

"On the 30tL of April the Lord Chief Justice signified 
that he had received from the Lord Chancellor a paper roll, 
sealed up, which was delivered to the clerk ; and being opened 
* * * was read." 

Bacon's answer would fill several of these pages. He 
replies to the twenty-eight charges against him, specifically, and 
seemingly honestly. Again and again he mentions the com- 
plicity of his " servants " — Sherebuiiie, Hatcher, Hunt — in the 
alleged bribe-taking. 

To Article 28, he answers : 

" 28. To the eight-and-twentieth article of the charge — 
viz., the Lord Chancellor hath given away to great exactions by 
his servants, both in respect of private seals, and otherwise for 
sealing of injunctions : / confess it ivas a great fault of neglect 
in me, that Hooked no better to my servants.^'' 

"On the 3d of May [1621] the Lords adjudged 'that, 
upon his own confession, they had found him guilty : and there- 
fore that he shall undergo fine and ransom of forty thousand 
pounds [between !$1,200,000 and -11,500,000, nowadays] ; be 
imprisoned in the Tower during the King's pleasure ; be forever 
incapable of any ofiice, place, or employment in the state or 
commonwealth ; and shall never sit in parliament, nor come 
within the verge of the court.' * * * 

" After two days' imprisonment he was liberated. * * * In 
September the King signed a warrant for the release of the par- 
liamentary fine. 

"Forced by the narrowness of his fortune into business, 
conscious of his owai powers, aware of the peculiar quahty of 
his mind,^ his heart was often in his study, while he lent his 
person to the robes of his office ; and he was culpably unmind- 

1 Sonnet cxiv : "And my great mind most kingly drinks it up." 



56 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

ful of the conduct of his servants, who amassed wealth meanly and 
rapaciously, while their careless master, himself always poor, with 
his thoughts on higher ventures, never stopped to inquire by what 
means they grew rich^ 

(Tliis last paragraph will be repeated and completed under 
Sonnet xxix, 1. 8.) 

Bacon busied himself, after his removal from his high office, 
with literary labors. One of the productions of the period 
between 1621 and 1625 is entitled, "An Advertisement Touch- 
ing a Holy War " (written in the year 1622). In the Dedication 
of that Paper to Lancelot Andrews, Lord Bishop of Wmchester, 
and Counsellor of Estate to His Majesty, Bacon says: 

My Lord: — 

Amongst consolations, it is not the least to represent to a 
man's self like examples of calamity in others. For examples 
give a quicker impression than argument ; and, besides, they 
certify us, that which the Scripture also tendereth for satisfac- 
tion, " that no new thing is happened unto us." This they do 
the better, by how much the examples are liker in circumstances 
to our own case ; and more especially if they fall upon persons 
that are greater and worthier than ourselves. For as it savoreth 
of vanity to match ourselves highly in our own conceit ; so, on 
the other side, it is a good sound conclusion, that, if our betters 
have sustained the like events, we have the less cause to be 
grieved. 

In this kind of consolation I have not been wanting to 
myself, though, as a Christian, I have tasted, through God's 
great goodness, of higher remedies. Having, therefore, 
through the variety of my reading, set before me many 
examples, both of ancient and later times, my thoughts, I 
confess, have chiefly stayed upon three particulars, as the most 
eminent and the most resembhng. All three persons had held 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 67 

chief place of authority in their countries ; all three ruined, 
not by war, or by any other disaster, but by justice and sentence, 
as delinquents and criminals ; all three famous writers, inso- 
much as the remembrance of their calamity is now as to 
posterity but as a little picture of night-work, remaining 
amongst the fair and excellent tables of their acts and works : 
and all three, if that were anything to the matter, fit examples 
to quench any man's ambition of rising again ; for that they 
were every one of them restored with great glory, but to their 
farther ruin and destruction, ending in a violent death. The 
men were — Demosthenes, Cicero, and Seneca. 

Thirty years previously he had Avritten — in Richard II., 
V, 5: 

Thoughts tending to content flatter themselves 
That they are not the first of fortune's slaves, 
Nor shall not be the last ; like silly beggars. 
Who, sitting in the stocks, refuge their shame, 
That many have, and others must, sit there : 
And in that thought they find a kind of peace, 
Bearing their own misfortune on the back 
Of such as have before endur'd the like. 

Surely, he must have re-read some of his dramatic writings, 
and some of the Sonnets — this one, for instance — in his old 
age, with grim interest. 



Relatively to the charges against Bacon, Wilham Aldis 
Wright, in 1873, wrote : 

" That Bacon took bribes for the perversion of justice no 
one has ventured to assert. Not one of the thousands of 
decrees which he made as Chancellor was ever set aside. None 
of his judgments were reversed. Even those who first charged 
him with accepting money admitted that he decided against them. 



58 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

What his own opinions were concerning judicial bribery we 
know from many passages in his writings, and it would argue 
him a hypocrite of the deepest dye to suppose that he openly 
practiced what he as openly denounced. In his speech in the 
Common Pleas (May 3, 1617) to Justice Hutton, he admonishes 
him : ' That your hands, and the hands of your hands (I mean 
those about you) be clean, and uncorrupt from gifts, from 
meddling in titles, and from serving of turns, be they of great 
ones or small ones.' In his Essay ' Of Great Place,' first 
pubhshed in 1612, and reissued in 1625, he says : ' For 
corruption : Do not only bind thine own hands, or thy servants' 
hands, from taking, but bind the hands of suitors also from 
offering.' In confessing himself guilty of corruption, therefore, 
does he admit that the whole practice of his hfe had been a 
falsification of his principles ? Let us see. Of the twenty-two 
cases of bribery with which he was charged, and which we may 
safely assume were all that the malice of his enemies could 
discover against him, there are but four in which he allows that 
he had in any way received presents before the causes were 
ended ; and even in these, though technically the presents were 
made pendente lite, there is no hint that they affected his 
decision. During the four- years of his Chancellorship he had 
made orders and decrees to the number of two thousand a year, 
as he himself wrote to the Lords, and of the charges brought 
against him there was scarcely one that was not two years old. 
The witnesses to some of the most important were Churchill, a 
registrar of the Court of Chancery, who had been discharged 
for fraud ; and Hastings, who contradicted himself so much that 
his testimony is worthless. But we are more concerned with 
Bacon's confession of guilt than with the evidence by which 
the charge was supported. In a paper of memoranda which 
he drew up at the time, and which has been printed by Mr. 
Montagu (Bacon's Works, XVL, pt. i, p. cccxlv), he writes : 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 59 

' There be three degrees or cases, as I conceive, of gifts or 
rewards given to a judge. The first is of bargain, contract, or 
promise of reward, pendente lite. And of this my heart tells 
me I am iniiocent ; that I had no bribe or reward in my eye or 
thought when I pronounced any sentence or order. The second 
is a neglect in the judge to inform himself whether the cause 
be fully at an end, or no, what time he receives the gift ; but 
takes it upon the credit of the party that all is done, or other- 
wise omits to inquire. And the third is, when it is received 
sine fraude, after the cause ended; which it seems, by the 
opinions of the civilians, is no offence.' In another draft he 
adds this comment: "-For the first, I take myself to he as 
innocent as any horn on St. Innocents^ Day in my heart. For 
the second, I douht in some particulars I may be faulty. And 
for the last, I conceived it to he no fault.'' 

" Such is Bacon's own interpretation of his confession, and 
we are bound to accept it, for it is borne out by twenty-two of 
the articles of the charge. To the twenty-third article, that he 
had given way to great exactions by his servants, ' he confessed 
it to be a great fault that he had looked no better to his ser- 
vants.' With this confession, we may leave his name and 
memory, as he left it in his mil, ' to men's charitable speeches, 
and to foreign nations, and the next ages.' The verdict can 
hardly be other than that he pronounced himself : ' I was the 
justest judge that was in England these fifty years ; but it was 
the justest censure in Parliament that was these two hundred 
years.' " 

13-14. — Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee ; 

Till then not shew my head where thou may^st prove me. 

Compare Troilus and Cressida, iii, 2 : 

Praise us as ive are tasted, allow us as tve prove ; our head 
shall go bare till merit cro^vn it: no perfection in reversion shall 



60 TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

have a praise in present : we will not name desert before his 
birth ; and, being horn, his addition shall be humble. 

Compare Sonnet Lxvi, line 2 : 

As, to behold desert a beggar born. 

The full significance of the clause — " no perfection in rever- 
sion shall have a praise in present" — can be understood and 
appreciated thoroughly only after our becoming acquainted with 
Bacon's unpleasant experience as the holder of the reversion of 
an office. 

About 1597 Bacon wrote to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord 
Keeper: " * * * I gee opened unto me three not unhkely 
expectations of help : the one my practice ; the other, some 
proceeding in the Queen's service ; the third, the place I have 
in reversion — which, as it standeth now unto me, is but like 
another man's ground reaching upon my house, which may mend 
my prospect, but it doth not fill my barn." 

Compare Richard II., ii, 2, 1. 38: "'Tis in reversion that I 
do possess " ; and the style of the passage from Troilus and 
Cressida with The Preface of the Players, to the First Foho? 
Ed. 1623. 



Through oversight of mine — not by fault of the printer — 
this beginning of a letter of Bacon's to Essex, " on his Lord- 
ship's going on the expedition agamst Cadiz," was omitted from 
its proper page above : 

" I have no other argument to write on to your good Lord- 
ship, but upon demonstration of my deepest and most bounden 
duty [but to witness duty'], in fulness whereof I moan for your 
Lordship's absence. * * * Your Lordship's ever deepUest 
bounden, 

Fr. Bacon. 



TWENTY-SIXTH SONNET. 61 

In conclusion, I will ask Shakspereans : 

If Shaksper could write and did write this Sonnet to South- 
ampton, why could he not write, or why did he not write, at 
least one letter to the Earl? Or, granting that he did write 
one letter to that nobleman — who was an appreciative patron of 
hterary genius and talent — why should that letter not have 
been preserved ? 



-.oo>e5< 



62 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 



LXVI. 



fP?IR'D with all these, for restful death I cry, 

g^ As, to behold desert a beggar born, 

And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity, 

And purest faith unhappily forsworn. 

And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd, 5 

And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, 

And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd. 

And strength by limping sway disabled, 

And art made tongue-tied by authority. 

And folly, doctor-like, controlhng skill, 10 

And simple truth miscall'd simplicity, 

And captive good attending captain ill : 

Tir'd with all these, from these would I be gone, 

Save that, to die, I leave my love alone. 



1. — Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry. 

Bacon was, as we have read, for more than twenty years a 
persistent but always disappointed aspirant to ofi&ce in the 
Queen's service. He exclaims in Sonnet xxix : 

When, m disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, 
I all alone beweep my outcast state. 
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries. 
And look upon myself and curse my fate, &c. 

And writing from " Gray's Inn, this 21st of March, 1594," 
to the Lord High Treasurer, he begs of his noble uncle : " * * * 
If I did shew myself too credulous to idle hearsays, in regard 
of my right honorable kinsman and good friend. Sir Robert 
Cecil (whose good nature did well answer my honest hberty). 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 63 

your Lordship will impute it to the complexion of a suitor, and 
of a tired, sea-sick suitor," &c. 

To Foulk Grevil (undated) : " * * * For to be, as I told 
you, like a child following a bird, which, when he is nearest, 
flieth away, and lighteth a little before, and then the child after 
it again,^ and so in infinitum, I am loeary of it; as also of 
wearying my good friends, of whom, nevertheless, I hope in one 
course or other gratefully to deserve.''^ 

To the Lord Treasurer (undated) :"***! will use no 
reason to persuade your Lordship's mediation but this, that 
your Lordship and my other friends shall in this beg my life of 
the Queen ; for I see well the bar will be my bier, as I must and 
will use it rather than my poor estate or reputation shall decay ; 
but I stand indifferent ivhether Grod call me, or her Majesty.'''' 

To Sir Robert Cecil (undated): « * * * I think my 
fortune will set me at liberty, ivho a7n tveary of asserviling 
myself to every man's charity." 

Observe how naturally Bacon's feeUngs and emotions came 
to the surface in the Plays. Thus, in Coriolanus, ii, 3 : 
Better it is to die ; better to starve. 
Than crave the hire which first we do deserve. 

And in Titus Andronicus, i, 2 (written at least twenty 
years before Coriolanus) (Titus is burying his slain sons) : 
In peace and honor rest you here my sons ; 
Rome's readiest champions, repose you here, 
Secure from worldly chances and mishaps ! 
Here lurks no treason, here no envy swells. 
Here grow no damned grudges ; here no storms, 
No noise, but silence and eternal sleep ! 

1 Compare Coriolanus, i, 3: "I saw him run after a gilded 
butterfly; and wlien he caught it, he let it go again; and after it 
again." 



64 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

And in Hamlet, in, 1 : 

To be, or not to be, that is the question — &c. 
2. — As, to behold desert a beggar born. 

That he was an express embodiment of merit and desert 
was to Bacon himself a visible, palpable fact. There was as 
much truth as poetry intended by lines 7 and 8 of Sonnet Lxn : 

And for myself mine o^vn worth do define. 
As I all other in all worths surmount. 

To his brother Anthony he complains (as already quoted) : 
" * * * I receive so little thence where I deserved best^ 

To Essex: " * * * I am sure the latter [the Queen's 
rejection] I never deserved." 

To Lord Henry Howard (about 1601) : " I have deserved 
better than to have my name objected to envy." 

And in 1617 he writes to the Earl of Buckingham: 
« * * * I will rely upon your constancy and nature, and my 
own deserving.'''' 

He really meant all that his words signified and impHed in 
lines 9 and 10 of Sonnet xlix : 

I ensconce me here 
Within the knoivledge of mine own desert ; 

just as he would be entirely willing that his language should be 
understood literally in lines 9 and 10 of Sonnet cxiv : 

'Tis flattery in my seemg, 
And my great mind most kingly drinks it up. 

And he surely expressed his feeUng for himself when, in 
Titus Andronicus, i, 1, he made Bassianus say to the Romans 
assembled before the Capitol : 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 65 

And suffer not dishonor to approach 
The imperial seat, to virtue consecrate, 
To justice, continence, and nobility ; 
But let desert in pure election shine ; 
as well as when he made Ulysses declaim, in Troilus and Cressida, 

ni, 3 : 

For beauty, wit, 

High birth, vigor of bone, desert in service, 
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all 
To envious and calumniating time. 

And we hear the thoughts of this Sonnet and of Bacon's 
letters in the Prince of Morocco's unbashful utterances, in The 
Merchant of Venice, ii, 7 : 

* * * To be afeard of my deserving, 
Were but a weak disabling of myself. 
As much as I deserve ! Why, that's the lady : 
I do in birth deserve her, and iri fortunes, 
In graces, and in qualities of breeding. 
And he undoubtedly had his own personality in his mind's 
eye when he put this scholarly speech in the mouth of the ser- 
vant Adam, in As You Like It, ii, 3 : 

Your virtues, gentle master, 
Are sanctified and holy traitors to you. 
O what a world is this, when what is comely 
Envenoms him that bears it ! 
The poet writes: " * * * desert a beggar born.^^ And 
Bacon wrote to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great 
Seal (appointed in 1596) : " My estate, to confess a truth to 
your Lordship, is weak and indebted, and needeth comfort ; for 
both my father, though I think I had greatest part in his love 
to all his children, yet in his ivisdom served me in as a last 
comer ; and myself^ in mine oivn industry, have rather referred 



66 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

and aspired to virtue than to gain : whereof I am not yet wise 
enough to repent me." 

This sentiment respecting virtue and gain he had long- 
before that time incorporated in Pericles, lY, 2: 

I held it ever, 
Virtue and cunning were endowments greater 
Than nobleness and riches.- 

Bacon Avas indeed born a beggar m the sense of being 
a beggar from the moment of his entering the field of active 
business and political life. The earliest record of his begging 
that I am acquainted with is his letter " From Clray's Inn, this 
16th September, 1580," (when he was about twenty years old) 
to Lady Burghley, requesting that " it please your Ladyship 
further to give me leave to make this request mito you, that 
it would please your good l.,adyship, in your letters, wherewith 
you visit my good Lord, to vouchsafe the mention and recom- 
mendation of my suit." So we may infer that his suing, or 
begging, began earlier than that date. And in 1621, after his 
deposition from the Chancellorship, he informs and reminds 
Buckingham : " I have lived hitherto upon the scraps of my 
former fortunes ; and I shall not be able to hold out longer. 
Therefore, I hope your Lordship will now, according to the 
loving promises and hopes given, settle my poor fortunes, or 
rather my being." 

About the same time he wrote his imploring letter to King 
James : " * * * My (jwn means, through my own improvi- 
dence, are poor and weak — little better than my father left 
me. * * * I most humbl}' beseech your Majesty to give me 
leave to conclude mth those words which necessity speaketh ; 
help me, dear Sovereign Lord and Master, and pity me so far, as 
I, that have borne a bag, be not now, in my age, forced in effect 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 67 

to bear a wallet ; nor I, that desire to live to study, may not 
be driven to study to live." 

His letters begging for intercession with the Queen in 
behalf of his place-seeking, and for pecuniary assistance, are too 
numerous to be quoted. 

Bacon's statement that he was " a last comer," and the 
poet's virtual admission that he was bom a beggar, remind me 
of two curious passages in Havelock Ellis's A Study of 
British Genius. On p. 117 that writer says: " In the small 
and medium-sized families it is the eldest who most frequently 
achieves fame ; in the large families it is the yomigest." On 
p. 118: " * * * Dugald found that the last-born child tends 
to be a pauper." And in Conclusions of the book, p. 233: 
" The fact of being either the youngest or the eldest child 
is a condition favorable for subsequent intellectual eminence." 

And a passage in The Advancement, Book i, also comes 
to mind : " Concerning want, and the fact that it is the case of 
learned men usually to begin with little, and not to grow rich so 
fast as other men, by reason that they convert not their labors 
chiefly to lucre and increase," &c. 

I fancy Bacon utilized his own experience and sentiments 
in writing the following part of the conversation in All's Well, 
1,3: 

Steward : Madam, the care I have ever had to your con- 
tent I wish might be found in the calendar of my past endeavors : 
for then we wound our modesty, and make foul the clearness of 
our deservings, when of ourselves we publish them. 

Countess : What does this knave here ? Get you gone, 
sirrah. The complaints I have heard of you I do not all beheve ; 
'tis my slowness that I do not : for I know you lack not folly to 
commit them, and have abiUty enough to make such knaveries 
vours. 



68 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

Clotvn : 'Tis not unknown to yon, madam, I am a poor 
fellow. 

Countess : Well, sir. 

Clown : No, madam ; "tis not so well that I am poor ; 
though many of the rich are damned. * * * 

Countess : Wilt thou needs be a beggar ? 

Clown : I do beg your good-will in this case. 

Countess : In what case ? 

Clotvn : In Isbel's case, and mine own. Service is no 
heritage, &c. 

(Bacon often complained that he was not advanced, or 
employed, in the Queen's service, as his father had been.) 

And that he identified Hamlet with himself, in Hamlet, ii, 2 : 
Beggar that 1 am, I am even poor in thanks. 

3. — And needy nothing trimmed in jollity. 

Bacon himself had been contemptuously called nothing — or 
" less than the least," by Coke. He now makes occasion to pass 
the comphment on to others. 

In a letter — dated March 30, 1594 — to Essex, he complains : 
" * * * And I must confess this very delay hath gone so near 
me, as it hatli almost overthro^\^l my health ; for when I revolved 
the good memory of my father, the near degree of alhance I 
stand in to my Lord Treasurer, your Lordship's so signalled and 
declared favor, the honorable testimony of so many counsellors, 
the commendations unlabored, and in sort offered by my Lords 
the Judges and the iVIaster of the Rolls elect ; that I was voiced 
with great expectation, and, though I say it myself, with the 
wishes of most men, to the higher place [that of Attorney- 
General] ; that I*^am a man that the Queen hath already done 
for, and that princes, especially her Majesty, love to make an 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 69 

end where tbey begin : ' a)id then add hereunto the ohseureness 
ayid many exceptions to my competitors : Avlien, 1 say, I revolve 
all this, I cannot but conclude with myself that no man ever 
read a more exquisite disgrace." ^ 

From a letter to the Lord Keeper, of the date July 28, 
1595, (printed under Hue 8, below,) I take the following para- 
graph : 

" * * * On the other side, if I perceive any insufficient^ 
obscure^ idol man offered to her Majesty, then I think myself 
double bound to use the best means I can for myself," &c. 

And from a letter to the Queen this excerpt: 

Madam : — 

Remembering that your Majesty had been gracious to me 
both in countenancing me and conferring upon me the reversion 
of a good place, and perceiving that your Majesty had taken 
some displeasure towards me, both these were arguments to 
move me to offer unto j'^our Majesty my service, to the end to 
have means to deserve your favor and to repair my error. 

1 Note how contradictory this opinion of the Queen's constancy 
is of the opinion expressed in the letter "framed as from Mr. 
Anthony Bacon to the Earl of Essex" (given above, under Sonnet 
XXVI, in the notes on the Dedication of Lucrece) : 

" * * * She hath that character of the divine nature and goodness 
SiS quos amniit, ainavit uxque (i<{ Jinem [those whom she has loved she 
has loved even to the end]." 

2 Wolsey, in Henry VIII., iii, 2, exclaims: 

U, how wretched 
Is that poor man that hangs on princes' favors ! 
There is betwixt that smile he would aspire to. 
That sweet aspect of princes and their ruin, 
More pangs and fears than wars or women have. 
Compare Cymbeline, v, 4 (under line 5, below) : 
Poor wretches that depend 
On greatness' favor, &c. 



70 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

Upon this ground I affected myself to no great matter, but 
only a place of my profession, such as I do see divers younger 
in proceeding to myself, and men of no great note, do without 
blame aspire unto. 

At this point I will let Montagu speak again : 

"In the spring of 1594, by the promotion of Sir Edward 
Coke to the office of Attorney-General, the Solicitorship became 
vacant. This had been foreseen by Bacon, and, from his near 
alUauce to the Lord Treasurer, from the friendship of Lord Essex, 
from the honorable testimony of the bar and of the bench, from 
the protection he had a right to hope for from the Queen— /or 
his father s sake, from the consciousness of his own merits and 
of the weakness of his competitors, Bacon could scarcely doubt 
of his success. 

" He did not, however, rest in an idle security ; for, 
though, to use his ow^l expression, he was ' voiced with great 
expectation and the wishes of all men,' yet he strenuously 
applied to the Lord Keeper, to Lord Burleigh, to Sir Robert 
Cecil, and to his yiohle friend Lord JEJssex,^ to further his suit. 

" To the Lord Keeper Puckering he apphed as to a lawyer 
having no sympathy with his pursuits or value for his attain- 
ments, in the hope of preventmg his opposition, rather than 
from any expectation of his support ; and he calculated rightly 
upon the Lord Keeper's disposition towards him, for, either 
hurt by Bacon's manner, of which he appeared to have com- 
plained, or from the usual antipathy of common minds to 
intellectual superiority, the Lord Keeper represented to the 
Queen that the two lawyers of the names of Bograve and 
Brathwayte were more meritorious candidates. Of the conduct 
of the Lord Keeper he felt and spoke indignantly. ' If,' he 

1 Why did he never apply to Southampton, if Southampton was 
the bosom friend of the Sonnets ?— //. 



STXTY-yiXTH SONNET. 71 

says, ' it please your Lordship but to call to mind from whom I 
am descended, and by whom, next to God, her Majesty, and 
your own virtue, your Lordship is ascended, I know you will 
have a compunction of mind to do me any wrong.' " 

Despite the Queen's continued, persistent rejection (for the 
reason that Bacon neglected — even though he did not refuse 
downright — to humiliate himself by recanting and apologizing 
for his speech on the Subsidies), Bacon declared that his devo- 
tion to her Majesty remained constant. He writes to Essex : 

It May Plp:ase Your Good Lordship: — I pray God 
her Majesty's weighing be not like the weight of a balance — 
" gravia deorsum, levia sursum " [" desert " downward, " needy 
nothing'' upward]. But I am as far from being altered in 
devotion towards her as I am from distrust that she will be 
altered in opinion towards me when she knoweth me better. 

•Jr. — A>id purest faith unliappily foi'Sivorn. 

Bacon seemed to cherish his faith in Elizabeth's promises 
long after the time when he might with reason have thrown that 
faith to the winds. He was a long while in becoming convinced 
that, in reality, at heart, Elizabeth cared nothing whatever for 
him. So, he is continually drumming at the ears of deaf heaven 
and of his too-acutely hearing friends, telling of the Queen's 
falseness and indifference. 

He wTites to Foulk Grevil : 

" Sir : — * * * My matter is an endless question. I assure 
you, I had said, requiesce anima mea ; but now I am otherwise 
put to my psalter, nolite coiifidere, I dare go no farther. Her 
Majesty had hy set speech more than once assured me of her 
intention to call me to her service ; ivhich I could not understand 
hut of the place I had been named to.'^ 

To the Queen : '■<■ * * * Your Majesty'' s favor, indeed, and 



72 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

access to your royal person, / did ever, encouraged hy your oivii 
speeches, seek and desired 

And in the letter to Essex, given above under line 3, he 
said, " I was voiced with great expectation." 

Finally, however, the scales fell from liis eyes, and he saw 
the Queen's heart and inind clearly. Then he wrote to his 
brother Anthony : " I pray you let me know what mine uncle 
Killigrew will do ; for I must be more careful of my credit than 
ever, since I receive so little thence where I deserved best. And, 
to be plain with you, I mean even to make the best of those 
small things I have with as much expedition as ma}^ be mthout 
loss ; and so sing a mass of requiem, I hope abroad. For I 
know her Majesty's nature, that she neither careth though the 
whole surname of Bacons travelled, nor of the Cecils neither.^'' 

I imagine Bacon meant a fling at Elizabeth in Othello, III 
3 (even though that play was not written before 1604, as 
Malone held) : 

Desdemona : You do love my Lord ; 

You have known him long; and be well 

assur'd. 
He shall in strangeness stand no further off 
Than in a pohtic distance. 
Qassio : Ay, but, lady, 

That pohcy may either last so long. 
Or feed upon such nice and waterish diet, 
Or breed itself so out of circumstance. 
That, I being absent, and my place supphed, 
My general will forget my love and service. 

Desdemona : Do not doubt that ; before Emilia here, 

I give thee warrant of thy place ; assure thee, 
If I do vow a friendship, III perform it 
To the last article, &c. 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 73 

Compare Green on the Queen's "shameless mendacity," 
under line 6, below. 

5. — J^rid gilded honor sliamefully misplacd. 

Under line 3 we read from Montagu's " Life of Bacon " 
about Bacon's striving and struggling for the Solicitorship. 
Montagu goes on to tell of the applicant's appeals to Lord 
Keeper Puckering, to Essex, to Lord Burghley, to Sir Robert 
Cecil, to the Queen ; but in vain. The Queen had made her 
mind up. Montagu continues : 

« When the Queen, A\ith the usual property of royalty — 
not to forget — mentioned his speech in Parliament, which yet 
rankled in her mind, and with an antipathy unworthy of her love 
of letters, said ' he was rather a man of study than of practice 
and experience,' he reminded her of his father, who was made 
Solicitor of the Augmentative Office when he was only twenty- 
seven years old, and had never practiced, and that Mr. Bograve, 
who had been recommended by the Lord Keeper, was without 
practice. 

" This contest lasted from April, 1594, till November, 1595 ; 
and what at first was merely doubt and hesitation in the Queen's 
mind became a struggle against the ascendency which she was 
conscious Essex had obtained over her, as she more than once 
urged that ' if either party were to give way, it ought to be 
Essex ; that his affection for Bacon ought to yield to her mis- 
like: * * * On the 5th of November, 1596, Mr. Sergeant 
Fleming was appointed Solicitor-General, to the surprise of the 
public and the deep-felt mortification of Bacon, and of his 
patron and friend. Lord Essex. The mortification of Essex 
partook strongly of the extremes of his character — of the gene- 
rous regard of wounded affection and the bitter vexation of 
wounded pride. He complained that a man every way worthy 
had ' fared ill, because he had made him a mean and a depend- 



74 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

ence ' ; but he did not rest here — he generously undertook the 
care of Bacon's future fortunes, and, by the gift of an estate, 
worth about ,£1,800, at the beautiful village of Twickenham, 
endeavored to remunerate him for his great loss of time and 
grievous disappointment. 

" How bitterly Bacon felt the disgrace of the Queen's 
rejection is apparent by his own letter, where he says that, 
' rejected with such circumstances, he could no longer look upon 
his friends,' '' &c. 

Mr. Lee, in the Dictionary of National Biography, under 
" Essex," tells this anecdote, that shows the truthfulness of this 
hue : " Essex's boyish vanity was hurt by the favor Elizabeth 
showed to Charles Blount [1563-1606] on his lirst appearance 
at court. He noticed that Blount wore about his arm a gold 
chess-queen which the Queen had given him, and he remarked 
at sight of it, ' Now I perceive that every fool must wear a 
favor.' " 

Bacon's discontent and unhappiness under disappointed 
ambition are well handled by Macaulay in his Essay on Bacon. 
That essayist writes : 

" The difference between the soaring angel and the creeping 
snake was but a type of the difference between Bacon the phi- 
losopher and Bacon the Attorney-General — Bacon seeking for 
truth and Bacon seeking for the Seals. * * * 

" To be leader of the human race in the career of improve- 
ment ; to found on the ruins of ancient intellectual dynasties a 
more prosperous and a more enduring empire ; to be revered to 
the latest generations as the most illustrious among the benefac- 
tors of mankind ; all this was mthin his reach. But all this 
availed him nothing ivhile some quibbling si^ecial '])l<'nder tvas pro- 
moted before him on the bench; while some heavy country gentle- 
man took precedence of him by virtue of a piirchased coronet,^^ 
&c. 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 75 

Now let us turn to a prose composition of Bacon's, intended 
for the Queen's perusal, and read the words of a candied tongue 
licking absurd pomp, and watch liim crook the pregnant hinges 
of the knee, that thrift may follow fawning — "In Praise of 
Queen Elizabeth " : 

" What should I wonder on to speak of the excellences of 
her nature, which cannot endure to be looked on with a discon- 
tented eye: of the constancy of her favors, which maketh 
service as a journey by land, whereas the service of other 
princes is like an embarking by sea. For her royal wisdom and 
pohcy of government, he shall note and observe the prudent 
temper she useth in admitting access ; of the one side main- 
taining the majesty of her degree, and on the other side not 
prejudicing herself by looking to her estate through too few 
wuidows : her exquisite judgment in choosing and finding good 
servants, a point beyond the former ; her profound discretion in 
assigning and appropriating every one of them to their aptest 
employment: her penetrating sight in discovering every marl's 
ends and drifts : her wonderful art in keeping servants in satis- 
faction, and yet in appetite,''^ &c. 

Then a sentence or two from his Essays. Essay xiv. Of 
Nobility : "He that standeth at a stay when others rise can 
hardly avoid motions of envy." Essay xv. Of Seditions and 
Troubles : " The causes and motions of seditions are — innova- 
tion m rehgion, taxes, alteration of laws and customs, breaking 
of privileges, general oppression, advancement of unworthy 
persons^'' &c. 

In Richard III., i, 3, Gloster says to Queen Elizabeth, in 
language indirectly aimed at Bacon's own times : 

The world is grown so bad 
That wrens may prey where eagles dare not perch. 
Since eveiy Jack becomes a gentleman. 
There's many a gentle person made a Jack. 



76 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

Queen Elizabeth answers : 

Come, come ; we know your meaning, brother Gloster ; 
You envy my advancement and my friends ; 
God grant us never may have need of you. 

To which Gloster replies : 

Meantime, God grants that we have need of you : 

Our brother is imprison'd by your means. 

Myself disgrac'd, and the nobility 

Held in contempt ; while great promotions 

Are daily given, to ennoble those 

That scarce, some two days since, were worth a noble.^ 

In Cymbeline, v, 4, Posthumus laments, in Baconian 

strain : 

Poor wretches that depend 

On greatness' favor dream as I have done ; 

Wake, and find nothing. But, alas ! I swerve : 

Many dream not to find, neither deserve, 

And yet are steep'd in favors. 

(Every scholar knows, of course, that this last passage can 
be paralleled from Twelfth Night, ii, 5 ; from Chapman's 
All Fools, V, 1 ; and from Bacon's Advancement.) 

And in the Merchant of Venice, ii, 9 — written about the 
same time this Sonnet was composed to hghten a heavy heart, 
in 1595-'6-'7 — Arragon is simply the mouthpiece of Bacon: 

Who shall go about 
To cozen fortune, and be honorable 
Without the stamp of merit ? Let none presume 
To wear an undeserved dignity. 

1 An example of the abominable quibbling, noticed under Sonnet 

XXVI. 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 77 

O, that estates, degrees, and offices, 
Were not deriv'd corruptly ! and that clear honor 
Were purchas'd by the merit of the wearer ! 
How many then should cover that stand bare ! 
How many be commanded that command ! 
How much low peasantry would then be glean'd 
From the true seed of honor ! and how much honor 
Pick'd from the chaff and rum of the times ! 

Compare Cymbeline, iii, 3, 1. 23 : 

Richer than doing nothing for a bauble — 

that is, obtaming a gilded honor without " travailmg " for it, 
as Blount obtained the gold chess-queen, for instance. 

Now let us compare with these sentiments from the Plays 
a sentiment of Bacon's that Montagu justly attaches value and 
significance to (Life of Bacon) : 

" As a patron of preferment, his favorite maxim was — 
Detur digniori ; qui beneficium dig no dat omnes ohligat.'''' (Let 
reward be given to the more worthy ; he who bestows a benefit 
on the worthy obliges all men.) 

And, further, compare this maxim with ParoUes's observa- 
tion, in All's Well, iii, 6 : " * * * The merit of service is 
seldom attributed to the true and exact performer." 

Tyler — Compare Ecclesiastes x, 6-6 : " There is an evil 
which I have seen under the sun, as an error which proceedeth 
from the ruler. Folly is set in great dignity." (See 1. 10.) 

Q.—And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted. 
Donnelly, writing on this Sonnet, says : " The bright 
morning-sun of hope had ceased to shine upon his brow. He 
' lacked advancement,' like Hamlet ; he had been overriden by 
the Queen. He despaired. He writes : ' I care not whether 
God or her Majesty call me.' In the Sonnet he says : 
' Tir'd of all these, for restful death I cry.' 



78 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

And the grounds of his lamentation are those a courtier might 
entertain, but scarcely a play actor. He beholds ' desert ' a 
beggar. Surely, this was not Shakspere's case. He sees 
nothingness elevated to power ; strength swayed by hmping 
weakness : himself with all his greatness overruled by the 
cripple Cecil. He sees the state and religion tying the tongue 
of art and shutting the mouth of free-thought. He sees evil 
triumphant in the world — ' captive Good attending captain 
111.' And may not the ' maiden virtue rudely strumpeted ' be 
a reflection on her of whom so many scandals were whispered ; 
who, it was said, had kept Leicester's bed-chamber next to her 
own ; who had for so many years suppressed Bacon ; and for 
whom, on her death, ' the honey-tongued Melicert ' dropped not 
one pitying tear ? " 

I should say that Bacon intended this Sonnet to touch 
the Queen's heart through her eye, which it was to reach either 
dkectly or indirectly. The Sonnet is, as every reader knows, 
not poetry, but merely a versified list of grievances, ending 
with a stereotyped, commonplace expression of regret for 
leaving the loved one. 

No commentator with even a smatter of knowledge of 
Elizabeth's reputation and character, and of Bacon's (or even 
of Shaksper's) opportunities of acquainting himself with them, 
would pretend to beheve that the poet was sincere in implying 
that the Queen was above reproach. We have already read 
about her recalhng Essex from the Continent ostensibly from 
sohcitude for his safety, and then passing the time of his stay 
with her m feasting and jollity, and about their remaining 
together " at cards, or one game or other,''' till the birds sang in 
the morning (a fact, by the way, that may explain some of the 
" wronged-lover Sonnets "). And Essex was only one of — how 
many, history saith not. 

Still, there may have existed a shadow of a reason for the 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 79 

writing of this — the 6th — line. It is possible that " talk " 
became exaggerated until it amounted to slander and calumny. 

Mr. W. H. Mallock, in the Pall Mall Magazine, January, 
1903, says : 

"No historian denies that during Elizabeth's Hfe-time it 
was whispered more than once in Court and diplomatic circles 
that the Virgin Queen had children. But the following curious 
passage from a little-known book shows that this gossip was at 
once more precise and more general than has been supposed. 

" The book in question is ' Simboleography,' by William 
West, published in 1618. Little as the title might suggest the 
fact, this book is a collection of legal cases ; and amongst them, 
on page 114, there occurs the case of some obscure person, 
who, ' not having , the fear of God before his e3^es, but misled 
by the instigation of the devil,' on ' the fifth day ' of a certain 
month, m a certain year, and at a certain place, ' narravit et 
publicavit de dicta domma, regina nunc, hsec falsa, seditiosa et 
scandalosa verba Anglicana sequentia — viz. : That the Queen 
hath had hy the Lord R. D. (prenobihs garterii miles) Two or 
Three Children, in magnum scandalum et contemptum dictae 
reginse et dignitatis suae ' — the ' R. D.' referred to being 
obviously Robert Dudley." 

I know of no more vividly graphic pen-picture of Elizabeth 
than Green's, in his Short History of the Enghsh People. I 
will reproduce it here, and let the reader himself make deduc- 
tions and inferences : 

"Her moral temper recalled in its strange contrasts the 
mixed blood within her veins. She was at once the daughter of 
Henry and of Anne Boleyn. From her father she inherited her 
frank and hearty address, her love of popularity and of free 
intercourse with the people, her dauntless courage, and her 
amazing self-confidence. Her harsh, man-like voice, her impetu- 



80 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

ous will, her pride, her furious outbursts of anger, came to her 
with her Tudor blood. She rated great nobles as if they were 
school-boys ; she met the insolence of Essex with a box on the 
ear; she would break, now and then, into the gravest 
dehberations to swear at her ministers like a fishwife. But 
strangely in contrast with the violent outlines of her Tudor 
temper stood the sensuous, self-indulgent nature she derived 
from Anne Boleyn. Splendor and pleasure were with Eliza- 
beth the very air she breathed. Her delight was to move in 
perpetual progresses from castle to castle through a series of 
gorgeous pageants, fanciful and extravagant as a Caliph's dream. 
She loved gaiety and laughter and wit. A happy retort or a 
finished compliment never failed to win her favor. She hoarded 
jewels. Her dresses were innumerable. Her vanity remained, 
even to old age, the vanity of a coquette in her teens. No 
adulation was too fulsome for her, no jiattery of her beauty too 
gross. ' To see her .was heaven,' Hutton told her ; ' the lack of 
her was hell.' She would play with her rings that her cour- 
tiers might note the delicacy of her hands, or dance a coranto, 
that the French ambassador, hidden dexterously behind a cur- 
tain, might report her sprightliness to his master. Her levity, 
her frivolous laughter, her unwomanly jests, gave color to a thou- 
sand scandals. Her character, in fact, like her portraits, was 
utterly without shade. Of womanly reserve or self-restraint she 
knew nothiiig. No instmct of dehcacy veiled the voluptuous 
temper which had broken out in the romps of her girlhood and 
showed itself almost ostentatiously throughout her later Kfe. 
Personal beauty in a man was a sure passport to her liking. 
She patted handsome young squires on the neck when they 
knelt to |kiss her hand, and fondled her ' sweet Robin,' Lord 
Leicester, in the face of the Court. 

" It was no wonder that the statesmen whom she outwitted 
held Elizabeth almost to the last to be little more than a frivolous 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 81 

woman, or that Philip of Spain ivondered how 'a wanton'' could 
hold in check the policy of the Escurial. But the Elizabeth 
whom they saw was far from bemg all of Elizabeth. The wilful- 
ness of Henry, the triviality of Anne Boleyn, played over the 
surface of a nature hard as steel, a temper purely intellectual, 
the very type of reason untouched hy imagination or passion. 
Luxurious and pleasure-loving as she seemed, Elizabeth lived 
simply and frugally, and she worked hard. Her vanity and 
caprice had no weight whatever with her in state affairs. The 
coquette of the presence chamber became the coolest and hardest 
of poHticians at the council board. Fresh from the flattery of 
her courtiers, she would tolerate no flattery in the closet. She 
was herself plain and downright of speech with her counsellors, 
and she looked for a corresponding plamness of speech in return. 
Her expenditure was parsimonious and even miserl}'. If any 
trace of her sex lingered in her actual statesmanship, it was 
seen in the simplicity and tenacity of purpose that often under- 
lies a woman's fluctuations of feeling. It was this, m part, 
which gave her her marked superiority over the statesmen of 
her time. 

" No nobler group of ministers ever gathered round a 
council board than those who gathered round the council board 
of Elizabeth. But she is the instrument of none. She listens, 
she weighs, she uses or puts by the counsels of each in 
turn, but her policy as a whole is her own. It was a policy, 
not of genius, but of good sense. Her aims were sim- 
ple and obvious : to preserve her throne, to keep England 
out of war, to restore civil and rehgious order. Something of 
womanly caution and timidity, perhaps, backed the passionless 
indifference with which she set aside the larger schemes of 
ambition which were ever opening before her eyes. She was 
resolute in her refusal of the Low Countries. She rejected 
with a laugh the offers of the Protestants to make her ' head of 



82 SIXTY-SIXTH SOXNET. 

the Religion' and 'mistress of the Seas.' But her amazing 
success in the end sprang mainly from this wise limitation of 
her aims. She had a finer sense than any one of her counsellors 
of her real resources ; she knew instinctively how far she could 
go, and what she could do. Her cold, critical intellect was 
never swayed by enthusiasm or by panic either to exaggerate or 
to under-estimate her risks or her power. * * * 

" She revelled in ' bye-ways ' and ' crooked ways.' She 
played with grave cabinets as a cat plays with a mouse, and 
with much of the same fehne delight in the mere embarrass- 
ment of her victims. When she was weary of mystifying 
foreign statesmen, she turned to find fresh sport in mystifpng 
her own ministers. Had Elizabeth written the story of her 
reign she would have prided herself, not on the triumph of 
England or the ruin of Spain, but on the skill mth which she 
had hoodwinked and outmtted every statesman in Europe 
during fifty years. * * * 

'■'■Nothing is more revolting in the Queen, but nothing is more 
characteristic, than her shameless mendacity. It was an age of 
political lying, hut in the jJ^ofusion and recklessness of her lies 
Elizabeth stood without a peer in Christeyidom. A falsehood 
was to her simply an intellectual means of meeting a difficulty ; 
and the ease with which she asserted or denied whatever suited 
her purpose was only equalled by the cynical indifference Avith 
which she met the exposure of her lies as soon as their purpose 
was answered. * * * Her vanity and affectation, her womanly 
fickleness and caprice, all had their part in the diplomatic come- 
dies she played with the successive candidates for her hand. 
If political necessities made her life a lonely one, she had at any 
rate the satisfaction of averting war and conspiracies by love- 
sonnets and romantic interviews, or of gaining a year of tran- 
quility by the dexterous spinning out of a flhtation. * * * 

" If in loftiness of aim her temper fell below many of the 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 83 

tempers of her time, in the breadth of its range, in the univer- 
sahty of its sympathy, it stood far above them all, Elizabeth 
could talk poetry with Spenser and philosophy with Bruno ; she 
could discuss Euphuism with Lyly, and enjoy the chivalry of 
Essex; she could turn from talk of the last fashions to pore 
with Cecil over despatches and treasury-books; she could pass 
from tracking traitors mth Walsingham to settle points of 
doctrine with Parker, or to calculate with Frobbisher the 
chances of a north-west passage to the Indies. The versatility 
and many-sidedness of her mind enabled her to understand 
every phase of the intellectual movement of her day, and to fix 
by a sort of instinct on its higher representatives.^ 

" We have had grander and nobler rulers, but none so 
popular as Ehzabeth. The passion of love, of loyalty, of 
admiration, which finds its most perfect expression in the 
' Faery Queen,' pulsed as intensely through the vems of her 
meanest subjects. To England, during her reign of half a 
century, she Avas a virgin and a Protestant Queen ; and her 
immorality, her absolute want of religious enthusiasm, failed 
utterly to blur the brightness of the national ideal. Her worst 
acts broke fruitlessly against the general devotion. A Puritan, 
whose hand she hacked off in a freak of tyrannous resentment, 
waved the stump round his head, and shouted, ' God save 
Queen Elizabeth ! ' Of her faults, indeed, England beyond the 
circle of her Court knew httle or nothing." 

Contrast with this characterization of Green's one by 
Bacon in the last paragraph of " The Fehcities of Queen 
Elizabeth " : 

" But, to make an end of this discourse, certainly this 
princess was good and moral, and such she would be acknowledged ; 

1 See Sonnet lxix, 1. 9 : 

They look into the beauty of thy mind. 



84 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

she detested vice, and desired to purchase fame only by honorable 
courses. And, indeed, whilst I mention her moral parts, there 
comes a certain passage into m}^ mind, which I will insert. 
Once giving order to write to her ambassador about certain 
instructions to be delivered apart to the Queen-mother of the 
house of Valois, and that her secretary had inserted a certain 
clause that the ambassador should say, as it were to endear her 
to the Queen-mother, ' That they two were the only pair of 
female princes from whom, for experience and arts of govern- 
ment, there was no less expected than from the greatest kings.' 
She utterly disliked the comparison, and commanded it to be 
put out, saying, ' That she practiced other principles and arts of 
government than the Queen-mother did.' " 

I will say in comment merely this — that (Ireen has added 
to our understanding of the line — And purest faith unhappily 
forstvorn. 

7. — And right perfection ivrongfully disgraced. 

We have read so much under line 2 of this Sonnet about 
Bacon's good opinion of himself, and so much under foregoing 
Sonnets about his " disgraces," that it would be superfluous to 
comment at length and in detail on this line. 

Maybe we can with good grace allow the self-laudatory 
appellation of Right Perfection to the man who possessed^ self- 
consciously, " the most exquisitely constructed intellect that has 
ever been bestowed on any of the children of men" — according 
to Macaulay. 

Regardless of what I said about " superfluousness " above, 
I will take a passage here from a letter to Essex, of October 
4th, 1596 — because Bacon's own experience with the Queen is 
so faithfully mirrored there. 

a * * * Wm the Queen ; if this be not the beginning, 
of any other course I see no end. And I will not now speak 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 85 

of favor of affection, but of other correspondence and agree- 
ableness, which, whensoever it shall be conjoined with the other 
of affection, I durst wager my life (let them make what 
prosopop.icas they will of her Majesty's nature) that in you she 
will con\e to the question of 'quid fiet homini, quern rex vult 
honorare?' But how is it now? A man of nature not to be 
ruled, that hath the advantage of my affection and knoweth it, 
of an estate not grounded to his greatness, of a popular reputa- 
tion, of a military dependence. I demand whether there can 
be a more dangerous image than this represented to any monarch 
living, much more to a lady, and of her Majesty's apprehension ? 
And is it not more evident than demonstration itself, that 
whilst this impression continueth in her Majesty's breast, you 
can find no other condition than inventions to keep your estate 
bare and low ; crossing and disgracing your actions, extenuating 
[lessening, diminishmg] and blasting of your merit, carping 
with contempt at your nature and fashions ; breeding, nourish- 
ing, and fortifying such instruments as are most factious against 
you ; repulses and scorns of your friends and dependants that 
are true and steadfast ; winning and inveigling away from you 
such as are flexible and wavering ; thrusting you into odious 
employments and offices to supplant your reputation, abusing 
you, and feeding you with dalliances and demonstrations, to 
divert you from descending into the serious consideration of 
your oAvn case ; yea, and percase venturing you in perilous and 
desperate enterprises. * * * ■' 

May we not quote, and compare with this extract, a 
passage from Hamlet's Soliloquy ? 

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time. 
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely. 
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, 
The insolence of office, and the spurns 
That patient merit of the unworthy takes ? 



86 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

8. — And strength hy limping sioay disabled. 

Donnelly told us, in the passage quoted under line 6 : "He 
sees nothingness elevated to power ; strength swayed by limping 
weakness ; himself with all his greatness overruled by the 
cripple Cecil." 

Bacon himself confirms these views of Donnelly's. 

In 1616 he writes to Sir George Villiers: " * * * In the 
time of the Cecils, the father and the son, able men were by 
design and of purpose suppressed." 

And his brother Anthony adds his testimony in a letter to 
his mother, of the date 5th February, 159 3-' 94, printed in 
Spedding : 

" Two vacancies among the puisne judges had been recently 
filled up, but the Mastership of the RoUs was still empty ; no 
one had yet been appointed to succeed Walsingham, who had 
been dead now nearly four years ; and there was another secre- 
taryship vacant besides. Burghley, weary of the delay, had 
begun to press the Queen for a decision, and ' straitly urged her 
to the nomination of Coke to be her Attorney-General' — the 
Rolls seemed to have been all along destined for Sir Thomas 
Egerton — ' and also to the nomination of a pair of secretaries, 
Sir Robert Cecil and Sir Edward Stafford, and a pair of other 
officers in her household.' But Essex set his face against all 
these appointments, and in a conversation with Sir Robert Cecil 
(30th January, 1593) declared himself more resolutely than ever 
in favor of Bacon. Sir Robert [here begins Spedding's extract 
from Anthony Bacon's letter] ' prayed him to be better advised ; 
saying, " If your Lordship had spoken of the Solicitorship, that 
might be of easier digestion to the Queen." " Digest me no 
digesting (said the Earl) ; for the Attorneyship is that I must 
have for Francis Bacon ; and in that I will spend my uttermost 
credit, friendship, and authority, against whomsoever" ; and that 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 87 

wliosoever Avent about to procure it to others, that it should cost 
both the mediators and the suitors the setting on before they 
came by it. " And this be you assured of, Sir Robert," quoth 
the Earl, " for now do I fully declare myself ; and for j^our own 
part, Sir Robert, / do think much and strange both of my Lord, 
your father, and you^ that can have the mind to seek the prefer- 
ment of a stranger before so 7iear a kinsman ; namely, consider- 
ing if you weigh in a balance his parts and sufficiency in any 
respect with those of his competitor, excepting only four poor 
years of admittance, which Francis Bacon hath more than 
recompensed with the priority of his reading, in all other 
respects you shall find no comparison between them.'' 

Dr. Rawley, in his Life of Bacon, says : 

" His bbth and other capacities qualified him above others 
of his profession to have ordinary accesses at Court, and to come 
frequently into the Queen's eye, who would often grace him 
with private and free communication, not only about matters 
of his profession or busmess in \ix\\, but also about the arduous 
affairs of estate; from whom she received from time to time 
great satisfaction. Nevertheless, though she cheered him much 
with the bounty of her countenance, yet she never cheered him 
with the bomity of her hand ; having never conferred upon him 
any ordinary place or means of honor or piofit, save only one 
dry reversion of the Register's Office in the Star Chamber, 
worth about 1,6001. per annum, for which he waited in expecta- 
tion either fully or near twenty years ; * * * which might be 
imputed, not so much to her Majesty's averseness and disaffec- 
tion towards him, as to the arts and policy of a great statesman 
then, who labored by all industrious and secret means to 
suppress and keep him down; lest, if he had risen, he might 
have obscured his glory." 

To this, Spedding adds the note : 

" The person here alluded to is probably his cousin, Robert 



88 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

Cecil, who, though he always professed an anxiety to serve him, 
was supposed (apparently not without reason) to have thrown 
obstacles secretly in the way of his advancement." 

That Bacon was disabled by his lame, limping kinsman, 
Cecil, is an historical fact. It does not follow as a matter of 
course, though, that Cecil is indicated by the words " limping 
sway." The participle may be used metaphorically, thereby 
making the designation applicable to some other wielder of 
sway. In fact. Lord Keeper Puckermg was as unfriendly to 
Bacon's aspirations as either of the Cecils was. 

Montagu says : " That Bacon had a powerful enemy was 
evinced not only by the whole of Elizabeth's conduct during 
this protracted suit, but by the anger with which she met the 
earnest pleadings of Essex, by her perpetual refusals to come 
to any decision, and, above all, by her remarkable expressions, 
that ' Bacon had a great wit, and much learning, but that in 
law he could show to the uttermost of his knowledge, and was 
not deep.' Essex was convinced that his enemy was the Lord 
Keeper, to whom he wrote, desiring that the Lord Keeper would 
no longer consider him a suitor for Bacon, but for himself ; that 
upon him would light the disgrace as well of the protraction as 
of the refusal of the suit ; and complained with much bitterness 
of those who ought to be Bacon's friends." 

Here follows the opening of one of Essex's letters : 

To THE Right Honorable the Lord Keeper: — 

My Lord : — In my last conference with your Lordship I 
did entreat you both to forbear hurting of Mr. Fr. Bacon's 
cause, and to suspend your judgment of his mind towards your 
Lordship, till I had spoken with him. 

Essex's letter was written " 31 August, 1595." Just one 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET, 89 

month previously — " from Gray's Inn, the 28th of July, 1595 " — 
Bacon himself had written to the Lord Keeper : 

It May Please Your Lordship : — There hath nothing 
happened to me in the course of my business more contrary to 
my expectation than your Lordship's failing me, and crossing 
me now in the conclusion, when friends are best tried. But 
now I desire no more suit of your Lordship than I would do if 
I were a suitor in the Chancery — which is this only, that you 
would do me right. And I, for my part, though I have much to 
allege, yet, nevertheless, if I see her Majesty settle her choice 
upon an able man, such a one as Mr. Sergeant Fleming, I will 
make no means to alter it. 

On the other side, if I perceive any insutficient, obscure, 
idol man offered to her Majesty, then I think myself double 
bound to use the best means I can for m3'self, which I humbly 
pray your Lordship I may do with your favor, and that you will 
not disable me farther than is cause. And so I commend your 
Lordship to God's preservation. 

That beareth your Lordship all humble respect, 

Fr. Bacon. 

After the accession of James, Bacon wrote this letter to 
his inveterate enemy. Sir Edward Coke : 

Mr. Attorney : — I thought best, once for all, to let you 
know in plainness what I find of you and what you shall find of 
me. You take to yourself a hberty to disgrace and disable my 
law, ^ experience, and discretion ; what it pleases you I pray 
think of me. I am one that know both mine own wants and 

1 Macaulay says: "The Cecils, we suspect, did their best to 
spread this opinion [Elizabeth's, just now given] by whispers and 
insinuations. Coke openly proclaimed it with that rancorous inso- 
lence which was habitual to him. No reports are more readily 
believed than those which disparage genius and soothe envy of 
conscious mediocrity." 



90 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

Other men's: and it may be, perchance, that mine may mend 
when others stand at a stay. And, surely, I may not in public 
place endure to be wronged, without repellmg the same to my 
best advantage to right myself. You are great, and therefore 
have the more enviers, which would be glad to have you paid 
at another's cost. Since the time I missed the Solicitor's place — 
the rather, I think, by your means — I -cannot expect that you 
and I shall ever serve as Attorney and Solicitor together, but 
either to serve with another upon your remove, or to step into 
some other course. So as I am more free than ever I ivas from 
any occasion of unworthy confirminy myself to you [I — captive 
Good — am more free than ever I was from attending you — cap- 
tain 111], more than general good mamiers, or your particular 
good usage, shall provoke ; and if you had not been short- 
sighted in your own fortune (as I think), you might have had 
more use of me ; but that tide is past, &c. 

Compare the language of the Prince of Morocco, under 
line 2, above : 

To be afeard of my deserving 
Were but a weak disabling of myself. 

In this hue Baconians accept the word Sttength as stand- 
ing metaphorically, metonymically for Me, Bacon. And there 
seems to be ground to base the acceptation on. 

About the year 1591 he wrote to Lord Treasurer Burghley 
the famous letter in which he avows that he has taken all 
knowledge for his " providence " ; and in that letter occur these 
two sentences : " And I do easily see that place of any reason- 
able countenance doth bring commandment of more wits than 
of a man's own, which is the thing I greatly affect. And for 
your Lordship, perhaps, you shall not find more strength and 
less encounter in any other." (See the letter at the beginning 
of Sonnet xxv.) 



SIXTY-SXITH SONNET. 91 

And years afterwards he writes to King James, " touching 
the Solicitor's place " : " And I hope my former service shall 
be but beginnings to better, w^hen I am better strengthened.'''' 

Compare with this line Troilus and Cressida, i, 3, 1. 114 : 
Strength should be led of [by] imbecility. 

And Bacon, Advancement, Book ii : 
The most absolute monarch is sometimes led by his servants. 

Tyler thinks that this line 8 " describes the injury inflicted 
by an incompetent and feeble government." 

9. — And art made tongue-tied by authority. 

Donnelly — as quoted under hne 6 — says : " He sees the 
State and religion tying the tongue of art and shutting the 
mouth of free thought." 

In Bacon's philosophical writings we meet with passages 
justifying a different construction. Thus, in The Interpretation 
of Nature, he sa3^s : 

" Whereas the earliest quests for truth, made m better 
faith and wdth more fortunate result, used to cast into aphorisms, 
or sentences short, scattered, and untrammelled by method, the 
knowledge which it was their object to gather from the 
consideration of things and to store up for use ; which — show- 
ing simple representations of things discovered, and evident 
spaces and vacancies for things not discovered — were less 
fallacious, and invited men's talents and thoughts ahke to 
criticism and invention. 

" But now sciences are exhibited in such forms as to claim 
belief, not to solicit judgment, a7id they cheek with a sullen 
authority the generous spriyigings of invention [of art] : so that 
every succession and development of philosophy bears the 
character of master and disciple, not of inventor and continuer ; 



92 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

whence it necessarily follows that sciences remain in their own 
footsteps and never stii" from their ground. This has been 
done for many ages, so that what is positive is fixed, and that 
which is in question is kept in question, and continues wholly 
in the same state. * * * 

" * * * In the orders and customs of schools, colleges, 
and such conventual bodies, all is found to be adverse to the 
further progress of the sciences. For much the greater part 
are professoi's and in the receipt of emoluments. And the 
lectures and exercises are so arranged that nothing out of the 
common routine can easily arise in any one's mind. But if a 
man chance to use liberty of inquiry and judgment, he will 
soon find himself left in a great solitude. And if ever he 
can bear this, he will yet find that, in achieving his fortune, this 
industry and magnanimity mil be much hindrance to him. 
For in places of this kind men's studies are almost confined to 
the writings of certain authors ; from which, if any one 
disagrees, or propounds matter of argument, he is immediately 
set down as a turbulent person and an innovator. Though, if 
one judge fairly, there is a great difference between the govern- 
ment of civil affairs and the arts ; for the danger is not ahke of 
new light, and of new motion. It is true that in civil affairs 
change, though for the better, is suspected from fear of disorder ; 
smce governments rest on authority, consent, credit, opinion, 
not on demonstration and truth in abstract. But in the arts 
and sciences, as in mines, all sides sliould resound with new 
works and further progress. And it is so in right reason. But 
in real life * * * the government and administration of the 
knowledge which is in use presses cruelly and checks the 
increase and growth of science." 

Paragraphs 78-84 of the Novum Organum, Book i, are of 
interest under this line. From § 84 I take the following : 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 93 

" Again, the reverence for antiquity and the authority of 
men who have been esteemed great in philosophy and general 
unanimity, have retarded men from advancing in science, and 
almost enchanted them. -^ * * With regard to authority, it is 
the greatest weakness to attribute infinite credit to particular 
authors, and to refuse his own prerogative to time, the author of 
all authors, and, therefore, of all authority. For truth is rightly 
named the daughter of time, not of authority. It is not sur- 
prising, therefore, if the bonds of antiquity, authority, and una- 
nimity have so enchained the power of man that he is unable — 
as if bewitched — to become familiar with things themselves." 

And these sentences from § 88: 

" * * * One excuse, now from its repetition become 
familiar, is to be observed in every art — namely, that its pro- 
moters convert the weakness of the art itself into a calumny 
upon nature ; and whatever it in their hands fails to effect, they 
pronounce to be physically impossible. But how can the art 
ever be condemned whilst it acts as judge in its own cause? 
Even the present system of philosophy cherishes in its bosom 
certain positions or dogmas, which * * * are calculated to pro- 
duce the thorough conviction that no difficult, commanding, and 
powerful operation upon nature should be expected by means of 
art. * * * The only object of such philosophy is to acquire the 
reputation of perfection for their own art, and they are anxious 
to obtain the most silly and abandoned renown by causing a 
belief that whatever has not yet been invented and understood 
can never be so hereafter." 

Still, Donnelly's understanding, too, may be right. For 
multum in parvo on the subject I have selected a few sentences 
from Harness's Life of William Shakspeare: 

"That so little should be known with certainty of the 
history of his life was the natural consequence of the events 



94 SIXTY-SITXH SONNET. 

which immediately followed his dissolution. It is true that the 
age in which he flourished was little curious about the lives of 
literary men, but our ignorance must not wholly be attributed 
to the want of curiosity in the immediate successors of the poet. 
The public mind soon became violently agitated in the conflict 
of opposite opinions. Every individual was called upon to take 
his stand as the partisan of a religious or political faction. Each 
was too intimately occupied with his personal interest to find 
leisure for so peaceful a pursuit as tracing the biography of a 
poet. If this was the case during the time of civil commotion, 
under the puritanical dynasty of Cromwell the stage was totally 
destroyed, and the life of a dramatic author, however eminent 
his merits, would not only have been considered as a subject 
undeserving of inquiry, but only worthy of contempt and abomi- 
nation. The genius of Shakspeare was dear to Milton and 
Dryden, to a few lofty mmds and gifted spirits, but it was dead 
to the multitude of his countrymen, who, in their foohsh 
bigotry, would have considered their very houses as polluted if 
they had contamed a copy of his works. Even in the reign of 
Elizabeth the enmity against the stage was carried to a great 
extent; play-hooks were burnt privately by the bishops and pub- 
licly by the Puritans.^'' 

Irving quotes Dowden : " Can this line refer to the censor- 
ship of the stage ? " 

10. — And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill. 

A lecture from Bacon is the best annotation I know how 
to make on this hue. In the Novum Organum, Book i, §§ 64, 
65, we read: 

" 64.^ — -The empiric school produces dogmas of a more 
deformed and monstrous nature than the sophistic or theoretic 
school: not being founded in the light of common notions 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONXET. 95 

(which, however poor and superficial, is, yet, in a manner, 
universal and of a general tendency), but in the confined 
obscurity of a few experiments. Hence this species of philos- 
ophy appears probable and almost certain to those who have 
daily practice in such expeiiments, and have thus corrupted 
their imagination ; but incredible and futile to others. We 
have a strong instance of this in the alchymists and their 
dogmas ; it w^ould be difficult to find another in this age, unless, 
perhaps, in the philosophy of Gilbert.^ We could not, however, 
neglect to caution others agamst this school, because we already 
foresee and augur that, if men be [not] hereafter induced by 
our exhortations to apply themselves seriously to experiments 
(bidding farewell to the sopliistic doctrines), there will be inuni- 
nent danger from empirics, owing to the premature and forward 
haste of the understanding, and its jumping or flying to gen- 
eralities and the principles of things. We ought, therefore, 
already to meet the evil. 

" 65. — The corruption of philosophy by the mixing of it 
up with superstition and theology is of a much wider extent, 
and is most injurious to it, both as a whole and in parts. For 
the human understanding is exposed to the impressions of fancy 
no less than to those of vulgar notions. The disputatious and 
sophistic school entraps the understanding, whilst the fanciful, 
bombastic, and, as it were, poetical school, rather flatters it. 
There is a clear example of this among the Greeks, especially 
in Pythagoras, where, however, the superstition is coarse and 
overcharged, but it is more dangerous and refuied in Plato and 
his school. This evil is found also in some branches of other 
systems of philosophy, where it introduces abstracted forms, 
final and first causes, omitting frequently the intermediate, and 
the like. Against it we must use the greatest caution ; for the 

1 Gilbert of Colchester, "the Columbus of magnetism," whom 
Bacon failed to appreciate rightly. — H. 



96 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

apotheosis of error is the greatest evil of all, and when folly is 
worshipped it is, as it were, a plague-spot upon the understanding. 
Yet, some of the moderns have indulged this folly with such 
consummate inconsiderateness, that they have endeavored to 
build a system of natural philosophy on the first chapter of 
Genesis, the book of Job, and other parts of Scripture ; thus 
seeking the living amongst the dead. And this folly is the more 
to be prevented and restrained, because not only fantastical 
philosophy but heretical religion springs from the absurd 
mixture of matters divine and human." 



Tyler : In these lines — 9 and 10 — there seem to be allusions 
to universities and their technical phraseology. This view 
accords with the use of doctor-like, and line 9 (where art will 
denote "learning") may be taken to refer to opinions obnoxious 
to those in authority being forbidden to be expressed and 
published. 

11. — And simple truth miscalVd simplicity [weak- or simple- 
mindedness ; f oohshness] . 

Bacon — Advancement, Book ii : Nay, an honest man can 
do no good upon those that are wicked, to reclaim them, with- 
out the help of the knowledge of evil. For men of corrupted 
minds presuppose that honesty [simple truth] proceedeth from 
simplicity of morals, or manners, &c. 

Compare, too, the letter to the Lord Treasurer, under 
Sonnet Lvni, lines 13-14. 

12. — And captive Gfood atte^iding captain III. 

All his mature life Bacon was a captive, of one kind or 
another. Montagu says : 

" Through the whole of his life he endeavored to burst 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 97 

liis bonds and escape from law and politics — from mental 
.slavery to intellectual liberty. Perhaps the charge of incon- 
sistency, so often preferred against him, may be attributed to 
the varying impulse of such opposite motives." 

Yet, he described himself as a captive because he was not 
permitted to enter the Queen's service. In a letter to the 
Queen (the first lines of which are given at the beginning of 
the notes on Sonnet Lvn), he says : " * * * I would to God 
that I were hooded, that I saw less ; or that I could perform 
more ; for now I am like a hawk that bates, when I see occasion 
of service, but cannot fly, because I am tied to another's fist." 

As to the self-characterization — captive Grood — we were 
prepared to hear that, by Bacon's autobiographical line in 
The Interpretation of Nature (quoted in the introductory part 
of this work) : " And, in addition to this, because those things 
of whatever kind penetrate not beyond the condition and 
culture of this life, the hope occurred that I, born in no very 
prosperous state of religion, might, if called to civil affairs, 
contribute somewhat to the safety of souls." 

His view of the right " end of aspiring " he expressed in 
this classical, almost biblical, style : 

" Power to do good is the true and Imuful end of aspiring ; 
for good thoughts, though God accept them, yet towards men 
are little better than good dreams, except they be put in act ; 
and that cannot be without power and place as the vantage and 
commanding ground." (And from " power and place " Bacon 
was " barred " — was held a " captive " in " disgrace.") 

On this line I will re-quote some sentences from Donnelly 
that appear above in the Argument, in the explanation of the 
purposes of the Plays : 

" Being himself a mighty spirit, he saw through ' the 



98 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

muddy vesture of decay ' which darkly henis-m ruder minds, 
and beheld the shadowy outlines of that tremendous spirit of 
which he was himself, with all created things, but an expression. 

" He believed that God not only was, but was all-powerful 
and all-merciful, and that He had in His everlasting purposes 
to lift up man to a state of perfection and happiness on earth ; 
and (as I have shown) he believed that He had created him — 
even him, Francis Bacon, as an instrument to that end ; and to 
accomplish that end he toiled and labored almost from the cradle 
to the grave. 

" He was — in the great sense of the words — a priest and 
prophet of Grod, filled with the divine impulses of good. If he 
erred in his conceptions of truth, who shall stand between the 
Maker and His great child and take either to account ? " 

He was, indeed, as Donnelly calls him, " a priest and 
prophet of God " — and he was, moreover, an active, vocal 
preacher of good. He had studied his Seneca until he became 
saturated with that philosopher's " Morals." He seems to have 
had always floating before his mental vision the divine saying 
of that thinker, " Qui non vetat peccare cum possit, jubet " — 
" He who does not forbid sin when he is able to do so, gives 
the command to sin." His Essays are theological and moral 
sermons. 

And, finally, weigh this advice to Essex : 

" It is true that, in my well-meaning advices, out of my 
love to your Lordship, and perhaps out of the state of mine 
own mind, I have sometimes persuaded a course differing : ' ac 
tibi pro tutis insignia facta placebunt ' : be it so, yet remember 
that the signing of your name is nothing unless it be to some 
good patent or charter, whereby your country may be endowed 
with good and benefit : which I speak both to move you to 
preserve your person for further merit and service of her 
Majesty and your country," &c. 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 99 

It is an easy task to identify " Captain 111." He surely 
was no other than Sir Edward Coke. 

Montagu says : 

"Who can forget his treatment of Bacon, who, when 
reviled, reviled not again? * * * 

" Of Coke's bitter spirit there are so many painful instances 
that, unless Bacon had to complain of unfairness in other mat- 
ters, the acrimony which overflowed upon all could not be con- 
sidered altogether the effect of personal rivalry. It would have 
been well had his morbid feelings been confined to his profes- 
sional opponents ; but, unmindful of the old maxim, ' Let him 
take heed how he strikes who strikes with a dead hand,' his ran- 
corous abuse extended to prisoners on trial for their lives, for 
which he was severely censured by Bacon, who told him that in 
his pleadings he was ever wont to insult over misery. 

" Who can forget Coke's treatment of Raleigh, entitled as 
he was by station and attainments to the civil observances of a 
gentleman, and, by long imprisonment and subsequent mis- 
fortunes, to the commiseration of all men ? * * * Fierce with 
dark keepmg, his mind resembled some of those gloomy struc- 
tures where records and muniments are piled to the exclusion of 
all higher or nobler matters. . For genius he had no love ; with 
philosophy he had no sympathy. 

" Upon the trial of Raleigh, Coke, after denouncing him 
as an atheist and traitor, reproached him, with the usual 
antipathy of a contracted mind to a superior intellect, for being 
a genius and a man of wit. 

" When Bacon presented him with a copy of his Novum 
Organum, he wrote with his own hand, at the top of the title- 
page, Ediv. Q. ex dono auctoris. 

Auctori Consilium. 
Instaurare paras veterum documenta sophorum : 
Instaura Leges Justitiamq. prius. 



100 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

And over the device of the ship passing between Hercules's 
pillars he wrote the following verses : 

' It deserveth not to be read in schools, 
But to be freighted in the Ship of Fooles.' 

From professional altercations with this contracted mind, 
Bacon was rescued by his promotion." 

To Bacon this " educated " ruffian w^as the arch-fiend incar- 
nate. " Captain 111 " was a mild, refined appellation to have 
been bestowed by Bacon. And he virtually gave him the same 
appellation elsewhere, in his famous Letter of Expostulation to 
Lord Coke, in which he tells his eneni}^ . u * * * You cannot 
but have much of your estate, pardon my bluntness, ill gotr 

In 1594 Coke was promoted from the office of Sohcitor to 
that of Attorney-General. Bacon hoped, expected, and — as we 
have seen — failed, to obtain the Solicitorship. For many years 
he was compelled to "attend" Coke. The story of their 
animosities, friction, and clashing is too long to be recounted 
here. I will, though, remind the reader of the letter of Bacon's 
about Coke, of which a part was quoted under hne 9 of Sonnet 
xxx^Ti, above ; and of the one to Coke under line 8 of this 
Sonnet, in which Bacon rejoices that he is freer than he had 
been from any occasion of confirming himself to Coke — of 
" attending " him. 

And from a paper entitled Remembrances of His Majesty's 
Declaration Touching the Lord Coke, I make this selection : 

" That for things passed, his Majesty had noted in him 
[Coke] a perpetual turbulent carriage, first towards the liberties 
of his church and estate ecclesiastical ; towards his prerogative 
royal, and the branches thereof; and likewise towards all the 
settled jurisdictions of all his other courts, the high commission, 
the Star Chamber, the chancery, the provincial councils, the 
admiralty, the duchy, the court of requests, the commission of 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 101 

inquiries, the new boroughs of Ireland ; in all which he had 
raised troubles and new questions ; and lastly, in that which 
might concern the safety of his royal person, by his exposition 
of the laws in cases of high treason. 

" That, besides the actions themselves, his Majesty in his 
princely wisdom hath made two special observations of him: 
the one, that, having in his nature not one part of those things 
which are popular in men, being neither civil, nor affable, nor 
magnificent, he hath made himself popular by design only, in 
pulling down government.'''' 

Verily, Bacon must have regarded Coke as " Captain 111." 



The philosopher-poet-statesman's disappointments, slights, 
wrongs, rankled and festered in his very heart's fibre. It was 
his soul-crushing and clouding experience with Elizabeth, 
Burghley, Puckering, Coke, that made it possible — almost neces- 
sary — for him to' write, in Sonnet lviii. 

And patience, tame to sufferance, bide each check. 
Without accusing you of injury. 

And in Hamlet, iii, 1 : 

Who would bear the whips and scorns of time, 
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, 
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay. 
The insolence of office, and the spurns 
That patient merit of the unworthy takes, &c. 

And I imagine that, when, in 1st Henry IV., in, 1, he caused 
Hotspur's " evil manners to live in brass," he was pillorying for 
all time the unamiable disposition and boorish character of 
Edward Coke. Worcester remonstrates \\4th Hotspur : 



102 SIXTY-SIXTH SONKET. 

In faith, my lord, you are too tvilful plain ; 
And, since your coming hither, have done enough 
To put him quite beside his patience. 
You must needs learn, lord, to amend this fault : 
Though sometimes it show greatness, courage, blood 
(And that's the dearest grace it renders you). 
Yet oftentimes it doth present harsh rage. 
Defect of manners, want of government. 
Pride, haughtiness, opinion, and disdain : 
The least of which, haunting a nobleman, 
Loseth men's hearts, and leaves behind a stain 
Upon the beauty of all parts besides. 
Beguiling them of commendation. 

Compare this extract from the Letter of Expostulation : 

" As in your pleadings you were wont to insult over misery, 
and to inveigh bitterly at the persons, which bred you many 
enemies, whose poison yet swelleth, and the effects now appear, 
so are you still wont to be a little careless in this point, to praise 
or disgrace upon shght grounds, and that sometimes untruly ; 
so that your reproofs or commendations are for the most part 
neglected and condemned ; when the censure of a judge, coming 
slow but sure, should be a brand to the guilty, and a crown to 
the virtuous. You will jest at any man in public, without 
respect of the person's dignity or your own : this disgraceth 
your gravity, more than it can advance the opinion of your wit ; 
and so do all actions which we see you do directly with a touch 
of vainglory, having no respect to the true end. * * * God in 
this case is the only and best physician : the means he hath 
ordained on the advice of friends, the amendment of ourselves : 
for amendment is both physician and cure." 

Donnelly — Great Cryptogram, pp. 475-476 : 

" I have already shown that Bacon and the writer of the 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 103 

Plays were tolerant in the midst of the religious passions of 
the time. 

" WilUiam Henry Smith — Bacon and Shakspere, p. 58 — 
says : ' In an age of bigotry and religious persecution we find 
Bacon and Shakespeare expressing a toleration of all creeds 
and religions.' 

" Hepwoi-th Dixon — Personal History of Lord Bacon, p. 
325 — says, alluding to the appropriations for war expenses : 

" ' James takes this money, not without joy and wonder ; 
but when they ask him to banish recusants from London, to 
put down masses in ambassadors' houses, to disarm all the 
Papists, to prevent priests and Jesuits fi'om going abroad, he 
will not do it. In this resistance to a new persecution, his 
tolerant Chancellor [Bacon] stands at his back and bears the 
odium of his refusal. Bacon, who thinks the penal laws too 
harsh already, will not consent to mfiame the country, at such 
a time, by a new proclamation ; the penalties are strong, and 
in the hands of the magistrates ; he sees no need to spur their 
zeal by royal proclamations or the enactment of more savage 
laws. Here is a chance for Coke. Raving for gibbets and 
pillories in a style to quicken the pulse of Brownites, men who 
are wild with news from Heidelberg or Prague believe in his 
sincerity and partake of his heat. To be mild now, many good 
men think, is to be weak. In a state of war, philosophy and 
tolerance go to the wall ; when guns are pounding in the gates, 
even justice can be only done at the drumhead.' 

" Bacon's downfall, as we shall see hereafter, was largely 
due to this refusal to persecute the helpless at the bidding of 
the fanatical, led on hy the brutal and sordid Coke. 

"And in the same spirit he at all times preached mercy 

and generosity, in both his acknowledged works and the Plays. 

" Bacon, in his essay Of Discourse, enumerates, among the 



104 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

things which ought to be privileged from jest, ' religion, matters 
of state, and any case that deserveth pity.^ 

" While Carlyle says of Shakespeare : ' His laughter seems 
to pour forth in floods. * * * Not at mere weakness — at 
misery or poverty never. ^ 

" Bacon says — in the Prayer or Psalm that he composed : 
' The state and bread of the poor have always been dear to 
my heart.' 

" He labors ' to lift men out of their necessities and 
miseries.' 

" He seeks, ' in a despised weed, the good of all men.' 

" Bacon describes one of the fathers of ' Solomon's House,' 
in The New Atlantis, and says : ' He had an aspect as if he 
pitied men.' 

" We turn to Shakespeare and we find the same great traits 
of character. 

" Charles Knight speaks of ' Shakespeare's unvarying 
kindness toward wretched and oppressed humanity, in however 
low a shape.' 

"Gerald Massey — Sonnets of Shakespeare, p. 549 — says: 
' He has infinite pity for the suffermg and struggling and 
wounded by the way. The most powerful and pathetic plead- 
ings in behalf of Christian charity, out of the New Testament, 
have been spoken by Shakespeare. He takes to his large, warm 
heart much that the world usually casts out to perish in the 
cold. There is nothing too poor or mean to be embraced 
■wdthin the circle of his sympathies.' 

" Barry Cornwall refers to ' the extensive charity which 
Shakespeare inculcates.' 

" Birch — Philosophy and Religion of Shakespeare, p. 10 — 
says : ' He has, more than any other author, exalted the love of 
humanity. However he may indulge in invective against the 
artificial systems of religion, and be found even speaking 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 105 

against Christianity, yet in his material and natural speculations 
he endeavors to give philosophical consolation to mankind, to 
inculcate submission to inevitable circumstances, and encourage 
scientific investigation into the nature of things.'' 

" The reader will probably pause to see whether I have not 
misplaced this quotation, so completely does it fit the character 
and purposes of Francis Bacon. But no ; it was written by an 
Enghsh clergyman, in an essay upon the rehgion of Shake- 
speare, and the author probably never heard of the theory that 
Bacon wrote the Plays. 

" I append a few illustrative extracts from the Plays in 
corroboration of these opinions : 

Henry VIII., v, 2 : 

'Tis a cruelty 
To load a falling man.i 

Pericles, ii, 3 : 

Neither in our hearts nor outward eyes. 
Envy the great nor do the low despise. 

Henry V., iv, 1 : 

There is a soul of goodness in things evil. 
Would men observingly distil it out. 

1 It is noteworthy that we find also in Henry VIII., in, 2 : 

Press not a falling man too far ; 'tis virtue : 
His faults lie open to the law. 

And in a letter of Bacon's, written in 1621, to Sir Humphrey May, 
after the bringing of charges of bribe-taking against the writer: 
" * * * Satis est lapsos non erigere; urgere vero jacentes, aut 
praecipitantes impellere, certe est inhumanum. (It is enough not to 
raise up those who have fallen ; but to press the prostrate, or to push 
the stumbling, assuredly is inhuman.)"— fl". 



106 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

Lear, ni, 4 : 

Oh, I have ta'en 
Too little care of this ! Take physic, pomp ; 
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel ; 
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them 
And show the heavens more just." 

It is an easily tenable belief that the same aching heart 
that wrote this Sixty-sixth Sonnet also ^vrote the heart-cry of 
King Henry, in 2d Henry IV., in, 1 : 

O heaven ! that one might read the book of fate, 

And see the revolution of the times 

Make mountains level, and the continent — 

Weary of soHd firmness — melt itself 

Into the sea ! and, other times, to see 

The beachy girdle of the ocean 

Too wide for Neptune's hips ; how chances mock, 

And changes fill the cup of alteration 

With divers liquors ! O, if this were seen, 

The happiest youth — viewing his progress through, 

What perils past, what crosses to ensue — 

Would shut the book, ^ and sit him do^vn and die. 

A little above we read Donnelly saying that Bacon 
" at all times preached mercy and generosity, in both his 
acknowledged works and the Plays." 

1 This figurative use of the word "book" is one of the many 
little peculiarities in "Shakespeare" that point to Francis Bacon as 
their true author. Bacon's mind was strongly dominated by books, 
although he inveighed against them unsparingly ; and Bacon himself 
admitted (in an unaddressed letter): "I, who am a man of books " ; 
and in a letter to Sir Thomas Bodley: " * * =f Knowing myself by 
inward calling to be fitter to hold a book than to play a part." 



SIXTY-SIXTH SO^STNET. 107 

We remember, without effort, Portia's speech — 
The quahty of mercy is not strain'd — 

in The Merchant of Venice ; and Isabel's — 

Alas! alas! 
Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once ; 
And he that might the vantage best have took 
Found out the remedy : How would you be, 
If He which is the top of judgment should 
But judge you as you are ? O, think on that ; 
And mercy then will breathe within your lips, 
Like man new made, 

in Measure for Measure; and 

Sweet mercy is nobility's true badge, 

in Titus Andronicus ; and 

Pity is the virtue of the law, 
And none but tyrants use it cruelly, 

in Timon of Athens. 

Then, in Bacon's acknowledged writings, we find, amongst 
numberless passages in praise and advocacy of mercy, these fine 
sentiments : 

" Compassion ever beateth in the veins of noble blood," in 
his Submission and Supplication to the Lords of Parliament, in 
1621 ; and— 

" In causes of Hfe and death, judges ought (as far as the 
law permitted) in justice to remember mercy, and to cast a 
severe eye upon the example, but a merciful eye upon the 
person," in Essay LVI — Of Judicature. 

Now, Shakspereans have the right to ask " Baconians " how 
they harmonize these exquisite moral and humane sentiments 
and teachings with Bacon's " true character " " as portrayed by 
Macaulay " ; and they are not diffident in exercising their right. 



108 SIXTY-SIXTH SO^'NET. 

Macaulay — who was both one of the meanest of Bacon's 
detractors and one of the most eulogistic of his encomiasts — 
says : 

" Intellectually, he was better fitted than any [other] man 
that England has ever produced, for the work of improving 
her institutions. But, unhappily, we see that he did not 
scruple to exert his great powers for the purpose of introducing 
into those institutions new corruptions of the foulest kmd. 

" The same, or nearly the same, may be said of the tortur- 
ing of Peacham. If it be true that m the time of James the 
First the propriety of torturing prisoners was generally allowed, 
we should admit this as an excuse, though we should admit it 
less readily in the case of such a man as Bacon, than in the 
case of an ordinary lawyer or politician. 

" But the fact is that the practice of torturmg prisoners 
was then generally acknowledged by lawyers to be illegal, and 
was execrated by the public as barbarous." 

William Aldis Wright (who was not a believer in the 
Baconian authorship of "Shakespeare's" Plays) answers these 
accusations in dispassionate, judicial style: 

" Peacham's case was of a different nature [from that of 
Oliver St. John], and the charge against Bacon founded upon it 
is even more serious. There were difficulties, both of law and 
fact, to be met, and Bacon, according to Macaulay, ' was employed 
to settle the question of law by tampering with the judges, and 
the question of fact by toi-turing the prisoner.' Edmmid 
Peacham, a Somersetshire clergyman, having brought libellous 
accusations against his diocesan, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, 
was sent up to Lambeth to be tried before the High Commission, 
and sentenced to be deprived of his orders on the 19th of 
December, 1614. Before the sentence his house was searched' 
and a finished sermon was discovered, the contents of which 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 109 

were decided by the Council to be of a treasonable nature. It 
was thought, moreover, to indicate a state of disaffection in the 
part of the country to which Peacham belonged, and as he 
refused to criminate any accomplices, the Council resolved that 
he should be put to the torture. In this there is no evidence that 
Bacon had any hand whatever, further than that he, as Attorney- 
Creneral, was one of the Commission apj)ointed by the Council to 
attend the examination of the prisoner. It is clear that by the 
common law the use of torture for extracting evidence was 
regarded as illegal ; but it is equally clear that it was employed 
by the Council for discovery, and not for evidence ; that is, not 
to make a prisoner criminate himself, but to get from him other 
information which it was desirable to obtain. Bad as we may 
think this to he, it is not Bacon ivho was to blame for it. There is 
proof in his own letters that he engaged in the proceeding with 
reluctance, and that the step was taken against his advice. 

" How far he can be justified against the other charge, of 
tampering with the judges, depends upon a clear knowledge of 
what his interference really amounted to, and this is not easy to 
arrive at. As the torture had utterly failed to extort from 
Peacham any proof of the existence of a conspiracy, it became 
a question whether he himself could be proceeded against for 
treason. On this point of law the King was anxious to obtain 
the opinion of the judges of the King's Bench. It is not denied 
that the Crown had a right to consult the judges on points of 
this kind, but it does not appear to have been the custom to 
consult them separately, as was done in this case. There was 
no question with regard to Peacham's authorship of the sermon, 
which was in his handwriting. The points for the judges' con- 
sideration were, first, whether the sermon, had it been published, 
would have supported an indictment for treason ; and, secondly, 
whether it was possible to estabhsh a treasonable charge on the 
mere fact of composition. The idea of consulting the judges sepa- 



110 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

rately originated with the King. Whether he thought by this 
means to get a more genuine opinion from the others when they 
were not influenced by the presence and authority of Coke, or 
what was his motive, we have no means of knowing. That 
Bacon had anything to do with suggesting such a course, there is 
no evidence to show. What he did was to carry out the King's 
instructions, and to lay the case before the Lord Chief Justice 
for his opinion. Coke's opposition was not exerted against the 
consultation of the judges, but against their being consulted 
separately. None of the judges of the King's Bench had to try 
the case, and therefore it is hard to see with what truth BacovbS 
conduct can he described as tampering with the judges in order to 
procure a capital conviction. Peacham was ultimately tried at 
the assizes at Taunton, on the 7th of August, 1615, and con- 
victed of high treason, but the capital sentence was never car- 
ried into effect, because, as the report of his trial says of his 
offence, ' many of the judges were of opinion that it was not 
treason.' That his case excited any indignation in the country 
is a simple invention of Lord Campbell's." 

In conclusion, finally, I will express my opinion that we 
shall be quite as fair to Macaulay as Macaulay is to Bacon, if 
we tax that biographer with mixing discreditable envy and 
jealousy and mahce with the truth in the portrayal of his sub- 
ject, and that we may still confidently regard Bacon as Captive — 
indeed, even as Captain — Good. 



Under Sonnet cxix we shall become acquainted, better 
than we have yet become, with some reasons for Bacon's weari- 
ness and his willingness to die. 



And under future Sonnets we shall discover how Httle 
worthy — at heart — his " love," the Earl of Essex, really was of 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. Ill 

the life-sustaining affection and solicitude that Bacon felt for 
him and manifested for him, even to the executioner's block. 



Compare Bacon's expression of devotion to his love m the 
last line of this Sonnet with his relation of his devotion in the 
extract from the Apology, quoted m annotation of the first two 
lines of Sonnet xx\a. 



As a post-script to the foregoing notes and comments, I will 
insert a page or two from Richard Grant White's Studies in 
Shakespeare : 

" Shakespeare was forty-one years old when he wrote ' King 
Lear.' Just at the time of life when a well-constituted, healthy 
man has attained the maturity of his faculties, he produced the 
work in which we see his mind in all its might and majesty. 
He had then been an actor some fifteen years, and of his 
greater plays he had written ' Romeo and Juliet,' ' The Merchant 
of Venice,' ' King Henry IV,,' 'Much Ado About Nothing,' 
Hamlet,' and ' Measure for Measure.' Li the case of a writer 
whose work was of a nature that left him personally out of it, it 
is not safe to infer the condition of his mind from the tone of 
his writings. But it is worthy of remark that ' King Lear ' 
quickly followed ' Measure for Measure,' and came next to it as 
an original play, and was itself followed next by 'Timon of 
Athens,' and that in these three plays the mirror that is held up 
to human nature tells more revolting and alarmmg truths than 
are revealed in all his other plays together. Not in all the rest 
is the sum of the counts of his indictment of the great criminal so 
great, so grave, so black, so damning. Hardly is there to be 
gathered from all the others so many personages who are so bad 
in all the ways of badness as the majority of those are which 
figure in these three. 

" It is, however, apart from this fact that these plays are so 



112 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

strongly significant of Shakespeare's judgment of mankind in 
his forty-second year. For, types of badness as these personages 
are, what they say is ten-fold more condemnatory than what 
they do. The aphoristic anthology of ' Measure for Measure,' 
' King Lear,' and ' Timon of Athens ' would make the blackest 
pages in the records of the judgments against mankind. More- 
over, the chief dramatic motives of all these plays are selfish- 
ness and ingratitude ; while in two of them, ' King Lear ' and 
' Timon,' we find the principal personage expecting to buy love 
and words of love with bounteous gifts, and going mad with 
disappointment at not receiving what he thinks his due. For 
Timon in the forest, although he is not insane, is surely the 
subject of a self-inflicted monomania. Difficult as it is to trace 
Shakespeare himself in his plays, we can hardly err in con- 
cluding that there must have been in his experience of hfe and 
in the condition of his mind some reason for his production 
within three years, and with no intermediate rehef, of three 
such plays as those in question. And the play which came 
between ' Measure for Measure ' and ' King Lear ' — ' All's Well 
that Ends Well ' — although it is probably the product of the 
working over of an earlier play called ' Love's Labour's Won,' 
can hardly be said to break the continuity of feeling which runs 
through its predecessor and its two immediate successors. In 
' All's Well ' we have ParoUes, the vilest and basest character, 
although not the most wickedly mahcious, that Shakespeare 
wrought; and its hero, Bertram, is so coldly and brutally selfish 
that it is hard to forgive Helena for loving him. Indeed, the 
tone of the play finds an echo in the last fines of the Clown's 
song: 

With that she sigh-ed as she stood, 

And gave this sentence then : 
Among nine bad if one be good. 
Among nine bad if one be good, 

There's yet one good in ten. 



SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 113 

Was it sheer chance and hap-hazard that Shakespeare reverted 
to this unpleasant story and these repulsive personages at the 
time when, within three years, he wrote ' Measure for Measure,' 
' King Lear,' and ' Timon of Athens ' ? " 

In comment on White I mil say, first, that, despite that 
author's opinion, the probability indistinguishable from certainty 
is that the man who wrote King Lear was not just then forty- 
one years old, and was not named Shakespeare — unless pseudo- 
nymically — but was about forty-five years old and was named 
Francis Bacon. 

No Baconian wonders at the mability of Shakspereans 
(not Shakespeareans) to fuid Shaksper personally in the Poems 
and Plays. That actor and manager cannot be discovered — 
does not reveal himself^in those productions, for the very 
simple reason that he did not write even a single line of them. 

White says : " Not in all the rest [of the Plays] is the sum 
of the counts of his indictment of the great criminal so great, 
so grave, so black, so damning. * * * Difficult as it is to trace 
Shakespeare [he means, of course, Wilham Shaksper] himself 
in his plays, we can hardly err in concluding that there must 
have been in his experience of life and m the condition of his 
mind some reason for his production within three years, and 
with no intermediate relief, of three such plays as those in 
question." 

Now, if we regard WiUiam Shaksper as Shakespeare, we 
might substitute "guessing" or "conjecturing" for "con- 
cluding," in White's second sentence, with perfect propriety and 
truth ; for we really have no good ground for beheving or con- 
cluding that that business man actually had any such experience 
of Hfe and condition of mind as White alludes to. On the 
other hand, we know with certainty that Francis Bacon did have 
the very experience of hfe and the very condition of mind that 
would account for the production of the Plays in question. 



114 SIXTY-SIXTH SONNET. 

This — the sixty-sixth — Sonnet gives considerable insight in t 
Bacon's life, and explains his cynicism, his seeming misanthropy, 
in the Plays, to a great extent. Under an earlier Sonnet I have 
brought forward facts from the career and the trial of that arch- 
conspirator, Essex — the friend whose outrageous conduct wrung 
from Bacon's heart the cry of anguish^ — - 

For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright, 
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night — 
that tell of the supreme, shocking, crushing disillusionment of 
Bacon's life by " the great criminal." Shortly — two or three 
years — after the discovery of the true nature of his bosom 
friend, the lord of his love, his " good old mistress " the Queen 
died, without redeeming a smgle one of her countless promises 
to him. His trusted but untrustworthy cousin, Robert Cecil, 
had proved to be his secret enemy. His earl}- patron, South- 
ampton — liberated in 1603 from the Tower, where he had 
expected to serve out a sentence of imprisonment for life for 
compHcity in Essex's attempt against the Queen and the Govern- 
ment — had turned a cold shoulder on him and slighted his 
assurances of constant, uninterrupted friendship and loyalty. 
And Coke was as contemptuously, as maliciously, as rancorously 
inimical to him as he had been during the last decade of the 
Queen's lifetime. The world — as Bacon saw and understood , 
it — was going money-mad, commodity-mad ; it cared nothing 
for pure learnmg — not a whit for Bacon. Bacon was a lone- 
some, melancholic, disappointed, suppressed, impecunious, embit- 
tered, cynical, almost misanthropical dreamer, a philosopher-poet, 
a moralist, a prophet, in a half-crazy, half-savage world of stupid, 
selfish, idealless, workers, fighters, carousers, money-seekers, 
adventurers, Shakspers. Unquestionably, Bacon had the expe- 
rience of life and the condition of mind requisite for waiting the 
three Plays in question. There need be no conjecturing, no 
guessing, about Bacon's qualifiedness. There can be only con- 
jecturing, only guessing, only concluding from imaginary, 
nebulous premises, of a very unsatisfactory, very unscholarly 
kind, about Shaksper's qualifiedness. 



CONCLUSION. 115 

Conclueion. 



Some opinions and sentiments of a few distinguished 
writers respecting the Sonnets may prove a pleasing conclusion 
of this httle book to readers who have permitted their acquaint- 
ance with the literature of the question to grow rusty. 

First, I will again quote from White's Studies in Shake- 
speare — this time from the famous chapter entitled The Bacon- 
Shakespeare Craze (giving the exact language of the challenge 
to Baconians) : 

" To one stumbling-block in the path of the Bacon-Shake- 
speare theorists they seem to be quite bhnd — the 'Sonnets.' 
They busy themselves with Bacon's writings, with the Plays, and 
the Concordance ; and with their eyes fixed upon the one point 
which they hope to attain, these literary steeple-chasers, with 
their noses in the air, look right over this obstacle, which is one 
of many, each of which would bring them to the ground. They 
have httle to say about it ; and what they do say is not all to 
the purpose. If there is one fact in hterary history which, upon 
moral grounds, and upon internal and external evidence, is as 
certain as any recorded fact in general history, or as any demon- 
strated mathematical proposition, it is that the writer of the 
Plays was also the writer of the Sonnets, both of which bear 
the name of Shakespeare. In spirit, in manner, and in the use 
of language, their likeness is so absolute that if either one of 
the two groups had been pubhshed anonymously there would 
have been no room for doubt that it was by the writer of the 
other. Now, the Sonnets, or a considerable number of them, 
had been written before the year 1597 ; for, as all students of 
the hterature of the period know, they are mentioned by Francis 
Meres in his 'Palladis Tamia,' which was pubhshed in 1598. 
They were not then pubhshed ; they were not written for the 



116 CONCLUSION. 

public, as Meres tells us; they were not printed until eleven 
years afterwards, when they were procured for publication in 
some surreptitious or ^wasi-surreptitious way. Meres mentions 
them as Shakespeare's ' sugred sonnets among his private 
friends.' ^ 

" Now, if Bacon wrote the Plays, he also wrote the Sonnets 
[and vice versa, if he wrote the Sonnets, he also wrote the Plays, 
of course] ; and consequently we must beheve that the lawyer, 
philosopher, and statesman, who at twenty-six j^ears of age had 
planned his great system of inductive investigation, who never 
took his eye from that great purpose, who was strugghng with 
unpropitious fortune, who was a ceaseless place-hunter, who had 
difficulty in procuring the means of living in modest conformity 
to his position as a gentleman of good birth and high connection, 
who was a hard-working barrister conducting great public as 
well as private causes, an active member of Parhament and a 
scheming, if not an intriguing, courtier,'-^ occupied himself, not 

1 But neither Meres or any other contemporary of Shaksper told 
the world after 1609~the year in which the Sonnets were published— 
that the published Sonnets were the same as Shaksper's 'sugred 
sonnets.' Nor has any one whoever been able to adduce historical 
proof, or to advance good reasons for believing, that Henry 
Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, was at any time one of William 
Shaksper's "private friends." — H. 

2 All this fine writing of White's about Bacon's devotion of his 
entire time to occupations and pursuits that would have made impos- 
sible the writing by him of the Sonnets and the Plays, is a good 
instance of the ignorant assuredness of the typical Shaksperean as an 
anti-Baconian. Had White read one of Bacon's letters to his brother 
Anthony, written in 1594 (in one of the years in which, Mr. Lee and 
other authorities say, most of the Sonnets were written), he would 
have known more about his subject. At the close of the letter Bacon 
writes : 

" * * * I have here an idle pen or two, specially one, that was 
cozened, thinking to have got some money this term. I pray you 
send me somewhat else for them to write out besides your Irish co 1- 



CONCLUSION. 117 

only in writing plays, for which he might have got a little (for 
him a very little) money, but in writing fanciful sonnets — not 
an occasional sonnet or two, but one hundred and fifty-four 
sonnets, more than Wordsworth bestowed upon the world — 
which were not to be published or put to any profitable use, but 
which he gave to an actor, to be handed about as his own among 
his private friends, for their delectation and his glory. 

" This Bacon did, or he did not write the Plays. That he 
did so is morally impossible ; and indeed the supposition that 
he could have done so is too monstrously absurd to merit this 
serious examination^ of its possibility. * * * Bacon certainly 
did not write the Sonnets ; and therefore, as certainly, he did 
not write the Plays. * * * There is no visible avoidance of this 
conclusion." 

Before proceeding with quotations I will insert here the 

Dedication of the Sonnets. It is as follows : 

TO THE ONLIE BEGETTER OF 

THESE ENSUING SONNETS 

MR. W. H. ALL HAPPINESS 

AND THAT ETERNITIE 

PROMISED BY 

OUR EVER-LIVING POET 

WISHETH 

THE WELL-WISHING 

ADVENTURER IN 

SETTING 

FORTH. 

T. T. 

lection, which is almost done. Theie is a collection of King James, 
of foreign states, largeliest of Flanders, which, though it be no great 
matter, yet I would be glad to have it." 

Another letter, written to Sir Robert Cecil, " after the defeat of 
the Spaniards in Ireland," has a clause of the same tenor: 

" * * * As one that wisheth you all increase of honor, and as one 
that cannot leave to love the state, * * " and as one that now this 
dead vacation time have some leisure ad aliud agendum," &c. — H. 

1 Mr. White deceived himself. His examination is not serious. — 
H. 



118 CONCLUSION. 

About this Dedication Tyler, in his well-known edition of 
the Sonnets, says : 

" With respect to the initials, it may be remarked that on 
the titles of books the representation of names by initial letters 
was formerly much more common than is the case at present. 
As to who was intended by the final ' T. T.' there need be no 
question, since under date '20 May,' 1609, 'Shakespeare's 
sonnettes ' were entered in the Stationers' Register to Thomas 
Thorpe : 

' Thomas Thorpe Entered for his copie vnder th[e h]ands 
of master Wilson and master Lownes Warden a Booke called 
Shakespeare's sonnettes vjd.' 

" Thorpe, therefore, was ' the well-wishing adventurer in 
setting forth,' that is, of course, in publishing ; and there can 
be no question as to the meaning of ' our ever-living poet.* 
This can refer to no other than the author of the Sonnets. 
There remain, however, two questions which have given rise to 
much discussion : What is meant by the expression ' the only 
begetter'? and Who was 'Mr. W. H.'? * * * This [the 
second] question will be further considered in the sequel 
(chap. vn). But there are several answers which, supported 
by no valid evidence, need only the slightest mention. Thus 
there have been suggested Mr. William Hughes, Mr. William 
Hall, Mr. Wilham Hart, Mr. William' Hathaway, Mr. Wilham 
Shakespeare (the H. of the Dedication being a misprint for S.), 
and also Mr. William Himself." 

Mr. Tyler finally decides the question in favor of William 
Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. He is as certain and sure in his 
identification as in his belief, his conviction, his knowledge, that 
William Shaksper — not Francis Bacon — wrote the Sonnets and 
the other Poems and the Plays. 



CONCLUSION. 119 

But, after Tyler there came and wrote one mightier with 
the pen than Tyler — Mr.- Sidney Lee. 

In his Life of William Shakespeare, Chapter vii — The 
Sonnets and Their Literary History — that distinguished 
biographer and commentator writes : 

" It was doubtless to Shakespeare's personal relations with 
men and women of the Court that his sonnets owe their exist- 
ence. 1 * * * Shakespeare had lightly experimented with the 
Sonnet from the outset of his literary career. [Of course every 
reader will understand that by " Shakespeare " Mr. Lee means 
"the poet and dramatist" — not necessarily WillisLm Shaksper, 
the theatre manager. — H.^ Three well-turned examples figure 
in Love's Labor's Lost, probably his earliest play ; two of the 
choruses in Romeo and Juliet are couched in the sonnet form ; 
and a letter of the heroine, Helen, in All's Well that Ends 
Well, which bears traces of very early composition, takes the 
same shape. * * * But these were sporadic efforts. It was 
not until the spring of 1593, after Shakespeare had secured a 
nobleman's patronage for his earliest publication, Venus and 
Adonis, that he became a sonnetteer on an extended scale. Of 
the hundred and fifty-four Sonnets that survive outside his 
Plays, the greater number were in all likelihood composed 
between that date and the autumn of 1594, during his thirtieth 
and thirty-first years. His occasional reference in the Sonnets 
to his growing age was a conventional device traceable to 

1 Yet Dr. Ingleby, a high Shakespearean authority, who was com- 
missioned by the Shakspereans themselves to ascertain all that 
could be ascertained about Shaksper's acquaintance and relations 
with the prominent and literary men of his time, reported: "The 
bard of our admiration was unknown to the men of that age. * * * 
Doubtless he knew his men, but assuredly his men did not know 
him."—//. 



120 



CONCLUSION. 



Petrarch — of all the sonnetteers of the day, and admits of no 
literal interpretation.^ * * * 

" Very few of Shakespeare's ' sugared sonnets ' have a 
substantial right to be regarded as untutored cries of the soul. 
It is true that the Sonnets in which the writer reproaches him- 
self with sin, or gives expression to a sense of melancholy ,2 offer 
at times a convincing illusion of autobiographic confessions ; 
and it is just possible that they stand apart from the rest, and 
reveal the writer's inner consciousness [correct — they do reveal 
BacovCs "inner consciousness"], in which case they are not to 
be matched m any other of Shakespeare's literary compositions 
[incorrect — Bacon'' s feelings, opinions, sentiments, " inner con- 
sciousness," are plentifully revealed in the other Poems and in 
the Plays]. But they may be, on the other hand, merely hterary 
meditations, conceived by the greatest of dramatists, on infirm- 
ities incident to all human nature, and only attempted after the 
cue had been given him by rival sonnetteers. At any rate, their 
energetic lines are often adapted from the less forcible and less 
coherent utterances of contemporary poets, and the themes are 
common to ahnost all Elizabethan collections of sonnets. * * * 

" Genuine emotion or the writer's personal experience 
very rarely inspired the Elizabethan sonnet, and Shakespeare's 
Sonnets proved no exception to the rule [wrong, Mr. Lee]. A 
personal note may have escaped him involuntarily in the Sonnets, 
in which he gives voice to a sense of melancholy and self- 

1 Probably Lee is right, respecting Shaksper. But it is a fact that 
Bacon had the habit of alluding, in his letters, to his advancing age. 
So, no Baconian is at a loss to understand the presence of similar 
allusions in the Sonnets. About 1591, Bacon wrote to the Lord Trea- 
surer Burghley : "I wax now somewhat ancient ; one-and-thirty years 
is a great deal of sand in the hour-glass." — H. 

2 Just one sentence from a letter of Bacon's to Essex: "I hope 
her Majesty, of her clemency, yea, and justice, will pardon me, and 
not force me to pine here with melancholy." 



CONCLUSION. 121 

remorse, but his dramatic instinct never slept, and there is no 
proof that he is doing more in these Sonnets than produce 
dramatically the illusion of a personal confession.^ The sole 
biographical inference deducible from the Sonnets is that at one 
time in his career Shakespeare disdained no weapon of flattery 
in an endeavor to monopolize the bountiful patronage of a young 
man of rank. External evidence agrees with the internal 
evidence in identifying the belauded patron with the Earl of 
Southampton, and the real value to a biographer of Shakespeare's 
Sonnets is the corroboration they offer of the ancient tradition 
that the Earl of Southampton, to whom his two narrative poems 
were openly dedicated, gave Shakespeare at an early period of 
his literary career help and encouragement, which entitles the 
Earl to a place in the poet's biography resembhng that filled by 
the Duke Alfonso D'Este in the biography of Ariosto, or like 
that filled by Margaret, Duchess of Savoy, m the biogTaphy of 
Ronsard." 

Mr. Lee writes disingenuously, prevaricatingly. He knows 
that the Earl of Southampton is not justly " entitled to a place," 
&c., because we have only unreliable tradition in his favor; 
whereas we have reliable contemporary evidence and records in 
the cases of the Duke and the Duchess mentioned. His remarks 
would be faultlessly pertinent, though, to the Earl of Essex in 
his relations with Francis Bacon. Mr. Lee simply has an elastic, 
adjustable, accommodating literary conscience. 

That writer contmues : 

"Her [Ehzabeth's] death, on March 26, 1603, drew from 

1 The critical value of the last clause of Mr. Lee's sentence 
depends on the reader's understanding of, or requirements for, proof. 
Of course, there is no sworn testimony. There is, though, abundant 
comparative literary proof. — H. 



122 CONCLUSION. 

Shakespeare's early eulogist, Chettle, a vain appeal to him under 
the fanciful name of Mehcert, to 

Drop from his honied muse one sable teare, 
To mourn her death that grac-ed his desert, 
And to his laies opened her royal eare. 
(England's Mourning Garment, 1603, sign. D. 3.) 

But, except on sentimental grounds, the Queen's death justified 
no lamentation on the part of Shakespeare." 

True enough, the Queen's death justified no lamentation 
on the part of the true Shakespeare — Francis Bacon. The 
reader of these notes and comments already understands pretty 
well whi/. After reading Sonnets cxi and cxix he will under- 
stand even better than now. 

On some other points and parts of his subject Mr. Lee is 
liberal with more-trustworthy information. For instance (and 
here he gives critical attention to Mr. Tyler's theory and 
opinion) : 

" The appearance m a book of a dedication from the pub- 
lishers' (instead of from the author's) pen was, unless the sub- 
stitution was specifically accounted for on other grounds, an 
accepted sign that the author had no hand in the publication. 
Except in the case of his two narrative poems, which were pub- 
lished in 1593 and 1594 respectively, Shakespeare made no 
effort to publish any of his works, and uncomplainingly sub- 
mitted to the wholesale piracies of his plays [imagine the man 
whose aim in life was, as even Mr. Lee admits, to make money 
submitting uncomplainingly to robbery !] and the ascription to 
him of books by other hands. Such practices were encouraged 
by his passive indifference and the contemporary condition of 
the law of copyright. He cannot be credited with any respon- 
sibihty for the publication of Thorpe's collection of his Sonnets 
in 1609. * * * 



CONCLFSION. 123 

" A misunderstanding respecting Thorpe's preface and his 
part in the pubhcation has led many critics into a serious mis- 
interpretation of Shakespeare's poems. Thorpe's dedication 
was couched in the bombastic language which was habitual to 
him. He advertised Shakespeare as ' our ever-living poet.' As 
the chief promoter of the undertaking, he called himself ' the 
well-wishing adventurer in setting forth,' and in resonant phrase 
designated as the patron of the venture a partner in the specu- 
lation, ' Mr. W. H.,' ' all happiness ' and ' eternity,' such eternity 
as Shakespeare in the text of the Sonnets conventionally fore- 
told for his own verse. When Thorpe was organizing the 
issue of Marlowe's First Book of Lucan, in 1600, he sought 
the patronage of Edward Blount, a friend in the trade. ' W. 
H.' was doubtless in a like position. He is best identified with 
a stationer's assistant, WiUiam Hall, who was professionally 
engaged, like Thorpe, in procuring 'copy.' In 1606 'W. H.' 
won a conspicuous success in that direction, and conducted his 
operations under cover of the familiar initials. In that year 
' W. H.' announced that he had procured a neglected manuscript 
poem — A Foretold Meditation — by the Jesuit, Robert South- 
well, who had been executed in 1595, and he published it with 
a dedication (signed 'W. H.') vaunting his good fortune in 
meeting with such treasure-trove. When Thorpe dubbed ' Mr. 
W. H.,' with characteristic magniloquence, ' the only begetter 
(i. e., obtainer or procurer) of these ensuing sonnets,' he merely 
indicated that that personage was the first of the pirate pub- 
lisher fraternity to procure a manuscript of Shakespeare's 
Sonnets and recommend its surreptitious issue. In accordance 
with custom, Thorpe gave Hall's initials only, because he was 
an intimate associate, who was known by those initials to their 
common circle of friends. Hall was not a man of sufficiently 
wide pubhc reputation to render it probable that the printing 



124 CONCLUSION, 

of his full name would excite additional interest in the book or 
attract buyers. 

" The common assumption that Thorpe in this boastful 
preface was covertly addressing, under the initials ' Mr. W. H.' 
a young nobleman, to whom the Sonnets were origmally 
addressed, ignores the elementary principles of publishing trans- 
actions of the day, and especially of those of the type to which 
Thorpe's efforts were confuied. There was nothing mysterious 
or fantastic, although from a modern pomt of view there was 
much that lacked principle, in Thorpe's methods of business. 
His choice of patron for this, like all his volumes, was dictated 
solely by his mercantile interests. He was under no induce- 
ment and in no position to take into consideration the affairs of 
Shakespeare's private life. Shakespeare, through all but the 
earhest stages of his career, belonged socially to a world that 
was cut off" by impassable barriers from that in which Thorpe 
pursued his calling. It was wholly outside Thorpe's ami in life 
to seek to mystify his customers by investing a dedication with 
any crj^tic significance. 

" No peer of the day, moreover, bore a name which could 
be represented by the mitials ' Mr. W. H.' Shakespeare was 
never on terms of intimacy (although the contrary has often 
been recklessly assumed) with William, third Earl of Pembroke, 
when a youth [nor is there evidence extant that he was at any 
other time or age on terms of intimacy with that nobleman. — 
ir.Y I^^t were complete proofs of the acquaintanceship forth- 
coming, they would throw no hght on Thorpe's ' Mr. W. H.' 
The Earl of Pembroke was, from his birth to the date of his 

1 Yet George Wyndham — The Poems of Shakespeare, Introduc- 
tion, p. 29 — says: "Shakespeare's friendships with Southampton and 
William Herbert [Earl of Pembroke] are so fully attested as to pre- 
clude the omission of all reference to their lives from any attempt at 
reconstituting the life of Shakespeare." Attestation and imagination 
are, evidently, synonyms in Mr. Wyndham's private dictionary, — H. 



CONCLUSION. 125 

succession to the earldom in 1601, known by the courtesy title 
of Lord Herbert, and by no other name, and he could not have 
been designated at any period of his life by the symbols ' Mr. 
W. H.' In 1609 Pembroke was a high officer of state, and 
numerous books were dedicated to him in all the splendor of his 
many titles. Star-Chamber penalties would have been exacted 
of any publisher or author who denied him in print his titular 
distinctions." 

Judge Holmes — whom I have quoted in the Argument — 
says : 

"It has scarcely ever been doubted, among critics, that the 
Sonnets, smaller Poems, and Plays were the work of one and 
the same author; though many have experienced insurmount- 
able difficulties in the attempt to reconcile the Sonnets with the 
life of the man William Shakspere. The simihtude of thought, 
style, and diction are such as to put at rest all questions on that 
head. 

" Mr. Boswell doubted whether any true intimations could 
be drawn from the Sonnets of Shakespeare respecting the life 
and feelings of the author : certainly no such doubt could have 
arisen in his mind if he had considered them as the work of 
Francis Bacon. Li respect of ideas, opinions, modes of thinking 
and feeling, style, manner, and language, they hear the impress 
of Baeon\ mind, especially in the first half of his life ; and 
they exhibit states of mind and feeling which will find an expla- 
nation nowhere better than in his personal history. Many of 
them show the strongest internal evidence of their having been 
addressed to the Queen, as they no doubt were. Bacon tells us 
that ' she was very willing to be courted, wooed, and to have 
sonnets made in her commendation ; and, as we know, he was 
himself notoriously given to the writing of sonnets to this 
' mistress' eyebrow.' " 



126 CONCLUSION. 

Ignatius Donnelly, in his Great Crj^togram, Part II., Chap, 
vm — Corroborating Circumstances, Sect, vi — The Sonnets, 
says: 

" And in the so-called ' Shakespeare Sonnets ' we find a 
whole congeries of mysteries. * * * Some one speaks of that 
collection of Sonnets, published in 1609, as 'one of the most 
singular volumes ever issued from the press.' Let us point at a 
few of its singularities. Sonnet lxxvi says : 

Why is my verse so barren of new pride ? 

So far from variation or quick change ? 
Why, with the time, do I not glance aside 

To new-found methods and to compounds strange ? 
Why write I still all one, ever the same, 

And keep invention in a noted tveed, 
That every word dotli almost tell my name, 

Showing my birth and where they did proceed ? 

" What is the meaning of this ? Clearly that the writer 
was hidden in a weed, a disguise ; and we have already seen 
that Bacon used the word weed to signify a disguise. But it is 
more than a disguise — it is a noted disguise. Surely the name 
Shakespeare was noted enough. And the writer, covered by 
this disguise, fears that every word he writes doth betray 
him — doth ' almost tell his name,' their birth, and where they 
came from. This is all very remarkable if Shakspere was 
Shakespeare. Then there was no iveed, no disguise, and no 
danger of the secret authorship's being revealed. 

" But we find Francis Bacon, as I have shown, also referring 
to a weed. ' The state and bread of the poor and oppressed have 
been precious in mine eyes. I have hated all cruelty and hard- 
ness of heart. I have, though in a despised iveed, procured the 
good of all men.' [I have ever been "captive Good."] 

" Marvelous, indeed, is it to find Shakespeare's Sonnets 



CONCLUSION. 127 

referring to 'a noted iveed,' and Bacon referring to 'a despised 
weed ' / — that is to say, Shakespeare admits that the writer has 
kept invention in a disguise ; and Bacon claims that he himself, 
under a disguise, has procured the good of all men ; and that 
this disguise was a despised one, as the name of a play-actor 
like Shakespeare would necessarily be. 

" But there is another incompatibility in these Sonnets 
with the belief that William Shakspere wrote them. In Sonnet 
ex we read : 

Alas ! 'tis true, I have gone here and there. 
And made myself a motley to the view, 

Gor'd mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear. 

And in the next Sonnet we have : 

Oh, for my sake do you with Fortune chide, 
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, 
That did not better for my hfe provide 

Than pubhc means, which public manners breeds. 
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand. 

And almost thence my nature is subdued 
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand. 
" These lines have been interpreted to ' refer to the bitter 
feehng of personal degradation allowed by Shakespeare to result 
from his connection with the stage.' 

" But Halliwell-Philhpps says : 

' Is it conceivable that a man who encouraged a sentiment 
of this nature, one which must have been accompanied with a 
distaste and contempt for his profession, would have remained 
an actor years and years after any real necessity for such a course 
had expired? By the spring of 1602 at the latest, if not 
previously, he had acquired a secure and definite competence, 
independently of his emoluments as a dramatist, and yet eight 
years afterward, in 1610, he is discovered playing in company 



128 CONCLUSION. 

with Burbadge and Heminge at the Blackfriars Theater ' ( Out- 
lines Life of ShaJc., p. 110). 

" It is impossible that so transcendent a genius — a states- 
man, a historian, a lawyer, a ph ilosopher, a linguist, a courtier, 
a natural aristocrat; holding the 'many-headed mob' and 'the 
base mechanical fellows' in absolute contempt: with wealth 
enough to free him from the pinch of poverty — should have 
remained, almost to the very last, a ' vassal actor,' hable to be 
pelted with decayed vegetables, or tossed in a blanket, and 
ranked in legal estimation with vagabonds and prostitutes. It 
is impossible that he should have continued for so many years 
to act subordinate parts of ghosts and old men, in unroofed 
enclosures, amid the foul exhalations of a mob, which could 
only be covered by the burning of juniper branches. Surely 
such a man, in such an age of unrest, when humble but ambitious 
adventurers rose to high places, would have carved out for him- 
self some nobler position in life ; or would, at least, have left 
behind him some evidence that he tried to do so. 

" Neither can we conceive how one who commenced life as 
a peasant, and worked at the trade of a butcher, and who had 
fled to London to escape public whipping and imprisonment, 
could feel that his name ' received a brand ' by associating with 
Burbadge and Nathaniel Field and the other actors. Was it 
not, in every sense, an elevation for him? And if he felt 
ashamed of his connection with the stage, why did he, in his 
last act on earth, the drawing of his will, refer to his ' fellows,' 
Heminge and Condell, and leave them presents of rings ? 

" But all this feehng of humiliation here pictured would be 
most natural to Francis Bacon. The guilty goddess of his 
harmful deeds had, indeed, not provided him the necessaries of 
hf e, and he had been forced to have recourse to ' pubHc means ' — 
to-wit, play-writing ; and thereby his name had been ' branded, 
and his nature had been degraded to the level of the actors." 



CONCLUSION. 129 

In my comments on these two Sonnets — ex and cxi — some 
of my views differ from some of Donnelly's, and I believe I 
support my interpretation by valid reasoning and apt quotation 
from Bacon's letters. 

George Stronach, M. A., writing in The Pall Mall Maga- 
zine, February, 1902, under the title — Did Bacon Write Shake- 
speare's Plays ? — says : 

" Against the Baconian authorship it is urged that Bacon 
was not a poet. Mr. Leslie Stephen says : ' Bacon was not a 
poet, as any one may see who looks at his version of the Psalms.' 
[Judged by a similar performance, Sidney, too, was not a poet, 
for it would be hard to imagine a worse attempt to write poetry 
than his versification of the twenty-third Psalm. — ir.'\ Shelley, 
however, has put it on record that ' Lord Bacon was a poet.' 
* * * If he was not known as a poet to his contemporaries, it 
is remarkable that Stow, in his Annales (1615 edition), includes 
Sir Francis Bacon, Knight, among ' our moderne and present 
excellent poets which worthily flourish in their own works, and 
all of them, in my own knowledge, lived together in the Queen's 
raigne.' " 

Spedding — Francis Bacon and His Times, Vol. i, p. 5 — 
writes : " But in him [Bacon] the gift of seeing in prophetic 
vision what might be and ought to be was united with the prac- 
tical talent of devising means and handling minute details. He 
could at once imagine like a poet and execute like a clerk of 
the works." 

Again, in the fourteenth volume of The Works of Francis 
Bacon, p. Ill, Spedding expresses himself similarly : « * * * 
Bacon had all the natural faculties which a poet wants 
[requires] : a fine ear for metre, a fine feeling for imaginative 
effect in words, and a vein of poetic passion." 

Macaulay, in his Essay on Bacon, declares : " * * * The 
poetical faculty was powerful in Bacon's mind, but not, like his 



130 CONCLXJSION. 

wit, so powerful as occasionally to usurp the place of his reason, 
and to tyrannize over the whole man." 

Taine, in his English Literature, drew Bacon's mental, 
intellectual portrait with Michelangelo-like strokes : 

" In this band of scholars, dreamers, and inquirers, appears 
the most comprehensive, sensible, origmative of the minds of 
the age — Francis Bacon, a great and luminous intellect, one of 
the finest of this poetic progeny. * * * There is nothing in 
Enghsh prose superior to his diction. * * * His thought is in 
the manner of artists and poets, and he speaks after the manner 
of prophets and seers. * * * Shakespeare and the seers do not 
contain more vigorous or expressive condensations of thought, 
more resembling inspiration. * * * His process is that of the 
creators : it is inspiration, not reasoning." 

Mr. Isaac Hull Piatt, in his article — The Testimony of the 
First Folio of the Shakespeare Plays — in Book News, September 
1904, threshes over some old straw, and then asks a shrewd 
question : 

" At Jonson's death he — Jonson — left a book in manuscript 
called 'Timbre, or Discoveries Made Upon Men and Nature.' 
It contains two passages * * * . The first refers to Francis 
Bacon, and he says of him that he ' filled up all numbers and 
performed that in our tongue which may be compared or 
preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome, * * * so 
that he may be named and stand as the mark and acme of our 
language ' ; exactly, it will be observed, what he had previously 
said about the author of the Shakespeare plays, while of Wilham 
Shakspere, the player, he said that he ' loved the man and honored 
his memory,' but that ' he flowed with that facility that some- 
times it was necessary that he be stopped — snuffed out.' ' But 
he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more 
in him to be praised than pardoned.' In the same volume he 



COKCLUSION. 131 

enumerates the greatest ' wits ' of bis time. The list is : More, 
Wyatt, Surrey, Challoner, Smith, Eliot, Gardiner, Sir Nicholas 
Bacon, Sir PhiKp Sidney, Hooker, Essex, Raleigh, Savile, 
Sandys, Egerton, and Francis Bacon. Has he omitted him whom 
he declared to he the greatest of all, or has he mentioned him by 
another name ? " 

Finally, Mr. Tobie Matthew, writing from the Continent to 
Bacon, avers in a post-script : " The most prodigious wit that 
ever I knew of my nation, and of this side of the sea [as well], 
is of your Lordship's name, though he he known hy another.^'' 

Query : Were " Bacon " and " Shakespeare " in very truth 
interchangeable names ? I believe they were. 



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